| EllaLink | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Landing points | |
| Total length | Approx. 5,900 km between Sines (Portugal) and Fortaleza (Brazil) |
| Topology | 4 fiber pairs |
| Design capacity | 100 Tbit/s (4 fiber pairs) |
| Technology | DWDM |
| Date of first use | 1 June 2021 |
| Website | http://ella.link |
EllaLink is an optical submarine cable linking the European and South American continents with landing points in Sines in Portugal and Fortaleza in Brazil. It has currently the lowest latency (<60 ms round-trip delay time between Portugal and Brazil) on the market.[1]
For more than 20 years, there were no practical direct data transfer routes between Europe and South America. The only cable linking the two continents was Atlantis-2, which was not used for Internet data transfer due to its limited capacity.[2]
One of the project's main goals was to circumvent the United States and its upstream collection as the route connects Europe directly with South America; this middleman position gave the US National Security Agency the ability to spy on European and South American communications. It was deemed problematic to EllaLink by interested parties.[3] In that regard, then President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff said in 2014 that EllaLink would be central to "guarantee the neutrality" of the Internet, showing her wish to block Brazilian Internet traffic from being accessed for United States government activities.[4]
The cable was launched 1 June 2021, providing a direct data route between Portugal and Brazil.[5]