Latin America (LATAM) will descend upon São Paulo, Brazil’s vibrant financial center, this week for the Futurecom event. This year’s theme is “Inspiring Innovation”, and will encompass such hot topics as Smart Cities, 5G, IoT (Internet of Things), regulatory policies, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, machine learning, SDN/NFV, and even submarine networks. This premier event will be an excellent opportunity for the 20,000 attendees to discuss, collaborate, and debate the various challenges and opportunities facing LATAM.

LATAM Market Highlights

Although there have been economic challenges in the region, there are encouraging signs of positive growth in such areas of broadband internet access, 3G/4G mobile subscribers, and business services that together result in healthy ongoing 1G to 100G deployments, overland and undersea. The United Nations confirmed long ago that an increase in bandwidth penetration leads to growth in a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). As an increasing number of businesses and consumers gain access to reliable and ubiquitous bandwidth over both wireless and wireline networks, the importance of telecom growth in the LATAM market is quite evident.

Spotlight on Brazil

Brazil is by far the largest country in LATAM by geographic size and population, and is a key player in the region alongside México and Argentina, who together represent over two-thirds of the region’s total output. Let’s take a look at some notably statistics highlighting the growth of Brazil’s telecommunications sector.

• The IoT market is expected to reach revenues of US$3.3B by 2021
• The number of smartphone users is estimated to reach over 77M in 2017 (source)
• Telecom generated a revenue in approximately US$3.35M in 1Q2017 alone (source)
• The total capital expenditure or big data telecommunications services in the Latin America market reached US$633.3M in 2016 with the investment expected to reach close to $1.8B in 2022, led by Brazil and México.
• The emerging mobile payment market will grow from 800,000 registered users in 2013 to 87.6M in 2019 (source)

Ciena has been operating in Latin America for +15 years with regional offices in south Florida (USA), Buenos Aires (Argentina), México City (México), Guadalajara (Mexico), São Paulo (Brazil), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and Bogotá (Colômbia).

Ciena Submarine Workshop for Operators

New submarine cables, coupled with capacity upgrades to existing cables, have come to the forefront of LATAM telecom investments and will connect the South American continent to the rest of the world at unprecedented capacities. According to respected analyst firm TeleGeography, there are numerous new submarine cables that will go into service in the coming few years, such as Junior, Tannat , SEUL, ARBR, SAIL, SACS, EllaLink, Deep Blue Cable, and SAPL. These new submarine cable investments unleash massive leaps in capacity, increased competition, and improved overall network availability via greater diversity. No wonder they’re getting so much attention!

Ciena has helped submarine cable operators successfully upgrade their new and existing cables, including Angola Cables (MONET cable), Telefónica Global Solutions’ SAm-1 submarine and terrestrial network, and Latin American Nautilus, among many others. Our unique GeoMesh Extreme architecture allows cable operators to build simpler, faster, scalable, and highly reliable submarine networks.

Ciena is hosting a special workshop entitled “Ciena’s Vision for Submarine Networking” covering a comprehensive variety of submarine network-related topics including bandwidth drivers, artificial intelligence, Shannon’s Limit, big data analytics, open networks, as well as the expected impact of 5G on the subsea network infrastructure. Attendees will learn how submarine networks have and will continue to rapidly evolve with the goal of providing attendees with unique insights into how to best prepare for the tumultuous changes on the near horizon. All operators are welcome to this workshop, and we look forward to the interesting discussions to take place.

Ciena Futurecom Event Presence:

Date/Time: Tuesday, October 3
@ 11:10am – 12:40pm
Panel: “SDN, NFV, and Orchestration: Strategy, Challenges and Opportunities considering Legacy Networks”
Panelist: Hector Silva, Chief Technology Officer, CALA Strategic Sales Leader
Location: Colombia Room

Date/Time: Wednesday, October @ 5:20am – 6:40pm
Panel: “Essential Factors that Enable the Use of Submarine Cables in Brazil and South America”
Panelist: Brian Lavallée, Senior Director, Portfolio Solutions, Ciena

Date/Time: Thursday, October 5
@ 9:30am – 10:00am
Presentation: “The Evolution of the Autonomous Network
Presenter: Patricia Vello, Country Manager Brazil, Ciena
Location: Argentina Room

Date/Time: Thursday, October 5, 1:30pm – 5:00pm
Workshop: “Ciena’s Vision for Submarine Networking
Presenters: Brian Lavallée, Frank Santillo, and Ian Clarke
Location: Argentina Room

Join us in the Ciena Booth #E4 to discuss the very latest in technology developments and how they address real business challenges.