The Pan American Cable System

The Pan American Cable System, when completed in September 1998, will provide high capacity international telecommunication services between South America and the rest of the world. Pan American will be a cost effective 7300 km trunk and branch undersea cable system with landings in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Aruba, and the United States. It will be configured into four logical rings that will automatically protect traffic in the rest of the network should a fault occur in any branch. Initially planned to operate at 2.5 Gb/s on a single wavelength, the rings can be stacked using wavelength division multiplexing to increase capacity as demand for international services to the region grows. A highly sophisticated network management system will operate, administer, and maintain the entire network from a centralized, secure location.