By Vaughan O’Grady

Google says its Firmina submarine cable has now landed on the Argentine mainland.

According to the BNamericas new service, the final operations to complete cable laying at the Las Toninas landing site in Buenos Aires province were carried out in March and April.

Due to shallow waters in the area, a separate operation was carried out to take the cable to the beach and connect it to the deeper water infrastructure, which was installed in September last year.

When it was announced in June in 2021 Google described Firmina as an open subsea cable that will run from the East Coast of the United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with additional landings in Praia Grande, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay”.

The 14,000 kilometre cable was to be the longest cable in the world capable of running entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) became temporarily unavailable.

Together with the Tannat submarine cable, a 2,000 kilometre subsea cable connecting Uruguay (Maldonado), Brazil (Santos) and Argentina (Las Toninas), Firmina will, it is suggested, double the accessible capacity of submarine cables in Argentina. The Tannat consortium comprises Antel Uruguay and Google.

Telefónica’s submarine cable company Telxius is also participating in both the Firmina project and Tannat. It has a network of submarine cables across the Atlantic and two of its own cables – SAM1 and Brusa – deployed on the route between the US, Brazil and Argentina.

Firmina is Google’s fifth submarine cable in Latin America. The company is also part of the Humboldt submarine cable project that will link Latin America with Asia via Chile.