(Reuters) Brazil and the European Union agreed on Monday to lay an undersea communications cable from Lisbon to Fortaleza to reduce Brazil's reliance on the United States after Washington spied on Brasilia.
At a summit in Brussels, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said the $185 million cable project was central to "guarantee the neutrality" of the Internet, signaling her desire to shield Brazil's Internet traffic from U.S. surveillance. According to other sources, the construction is scheduled to begin in July.
A joint venture between Brazilian telecoms provider Telebras and Spain's IslaLink Submarine Cables would lay the communications link. Telebras would have a 35 percent stake, IslaLink would have a 45 percent interest and European and Brazilian pension funds could put up the remainder.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Open4D on Tuesday February 25 2014, @12:22PM
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ [submarinecablemap.com]
Looks like there are potentially already a couple of direct routes between Fortaleza and Lisbon (via the Canary Islands): 1 [submarinecablemap.com], 2 [submarinecablemap.com]
But as TFA says, "the existing cable between Europe and Brazil is outdated and only used for voice transmission."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bucc5062 on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:12PM
The most interesting line I saw was the one to Longyearbyen [wikipedia.org]. The town hold less then 3000 people, but the seem to have some pretty fine bandwidth options. If I read this wiki entry [wikipedia.org] it has a 10 Gbit/s line but can expand up to 2500 Gbit/s. I also learned that Norway has a space program [wikipedia.org]. All this from one link. Cool.
As a side note, perhaps those who complain about bandwidth connections in rural places could convince a space agency to set up shop near by.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2014, @01:15PM
Svalbard [wikipedia.org] is a very peculiar place because of the Svalbard Treaty [wikipedia.org] (take a look), there is more than just one space agency there although they don't all have their own permanent setup.
The Svalbard Satellite Station [wikipedia.org] might be the largest (EUMETSAT, NASA, ESA, and NOAA has some of their own stuff there as well) but there is lots of other stuff (I didn't find any more links to NASA stations or anything at a cursory glance to the Russian dishes but I didn't Google or anything like that).
Here's some of the links to various stuff on Wikipedia:
Polish Polar Station [wikipedia.org]
Arctic Yellow River Station (China) [wikipedia.org]
Himadri Station (India) [wikipedia.org]
In the vicinity of Ny-Ålesund [wikipedia.org] one has outposts/stations from Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, France, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and China.
There's also the Svalbard Global Seed Vault [wikipedia.org].