Looking at the Wikipedia article, it claims that  Atlantis-2 “can already be upgraded with current technology to 160Gbit/s”. Would be interesting why that wasn’t already done on this 20-year-old cable – assuming that the underground infrastructure (repeaters) are compatible with the newer modulations (or additional wavelengths, but that would have necessitated much more design), the upgrade cost should be small compared to the cable’s value.

From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces+colin-lists=highspeedcrow.ca@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Rubens Kuhl
Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2020 10:19 AM
Cc: Nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Re: SaoPaolo to Frankfurt

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 12:06 PM Max Tulyev <maxtul@netassist.ua> wrote:

Hi All!

Who can provide a VLAN from SaoPaolo to Frankfurt for remote IX.BR
participation? Please contact me off-list.

I see there is only one undersea cable going directly from Brazil to
Europe. Why?

And this single cable, Atlantis-2, has very little capacity so its usage is mostly voice traffic. 

There is a new cable in construction called EllaLink (https://ella.link/) that when installed will add plenty of capacity to this route, but most Brazil - Germany traffic goes thru the US nowadays. 

Alternative routes before EllaLink comes into operation would be one of the Brazil-Africa cables (one to Cameroon, the other to Angola) and then to Europe. 

Rubens