Americas to Get New Subsea Cable

PARIS and ARUBA -- A group of telecommunications operators consisting of Cable & Wireless Communications, Setar, Telconet, Telefónica a Global Solutions and United Telecommunication Services (UTS) has signed a turnkey contract with Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) to deploy the Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS), a 100G submarine cable system linking Jacksonville, Florida to Manta, Ecuador.

The 6000km submarine cable system will strengthen digital links as demand grows rapidly throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America for online content such as tourism related services, sports coverage and digital TV. Work will start before the end of the year and commercial operations for the PCCS are scheduled to commence by the third quarter of 2014.

In addition to Florida and Ecuador, the system will connect the islands of Tortola, Puerto Rico, Aruba and Curacao, as well as Cartagena in Colombia and Maria Chiquita and Balboa in Panama. The system will have an ultimate design capacity of 80 Terabit-per-second, dramatically boosting connectivity and substantially increasing the availability of broadband services. Additionally, the PCCS will increase communications reliability and help reduce the risk of communications disruption by providing cable route diversity and alternative bandwidth access to existing cables in the region.

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU)