Telebras S.A. and IslaLink S.L signed a shareholder agreement to create the joint venture that will be dedicated to launch and operate a submarine cable that will link directly the South American and European continents. This joint venture is a Brazilian company which will be 35% owned by Telebras, 45% owned by IslaLink and 20% owned by a third Brazilian shareholder, which will be defined after the constitution of the company and before the construction of the cable. The cable will provide more than 30 Tbps (terabits per second) of capacity and require an investment of USD 185 million to interconnect Brazil to Europe.

Intermediate landings in French Guiana, Cape Verde, Canary Islands and Madeira are also being considered. This project will enable Brazil and other Latin American countries to have direct access to the large Internet Exchange Points (IXP's) in the world, located in the cities of Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London and Paris, expanding the offer of international traffic capacity with lower latency and lower costs, thus enhancing performance and conditions for the general public and businesses, and particularly for those sectors with critical demands of latency such as health, cloud services and financial markets. The submarine cable will also enable more than 1,400 institutions of research and education in South America (800 of them in Brazil) and 3,000 in Europe, including schools, universities, university hospitals, among others, to expand the exchange of information relevant to development of science and technology in their respective countries.

This will intensify the exchange of data and images between research institutions in areas of astrophysics, cosmology, optical astronomy, among other high-demand bandwidth and low latency applications, given the recent adhesion of Brazil to the European Southern Observatory and the observatories in Chile.