BELLA-T

To achieve a long-term and significant improvement of the South American network, enabling RedCLARA to guarantee full and equal access by LA NRENs to the capacity to be procured on a direct Europe - Latin America submarine cable. This will be realised by upgrading RedCLARA's optical infrastructure in South America, which will allow the deployment of an optical network, generating synergies with the NRENs of the region, through increased capillarity and effectiveness.

DFN (Germany), FCT (Portugal), GARR (Italy), RedIRIS (Spain), RENATER (France), GÉANT (Europe). CEDIA (Ecuador), RENATA (Colombia), REUNA (Chile), RNP (Brazil), RedCLARA (Latin America - Coordinator).

1. To create an optical backbone network in South America, connecting the cities of Fortaleza, Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre (Brazil), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Santiago (Chile), Guayaquil (Ecuador), Bogotá (Colombia), Cucuta (Colombian border with Venezuela) and Cartagena (Colombia).
2. To exploit synergies between RedCLARA and the South American NRENs, taking advantage of the fact that the proposed terrestrial backbone will cross several cities in each of the countries involved, making it possible to share the very same optical infrastructure to improve national capillarity, and thus strengthen the national network.
3. To form the human capital required to deploy, maintain and operate optical networks, by sharing expertise, training new personnel and strengthening the cooperation networks between the NRENs, which is key to the successful operation and exploitation of the proposed optical network.
4. To ensure the sustainability of the optical infrastructure by creating a new financial model for RedCLARA that takes into consideration new regional possibilities and the lower costs offered by direct transatlantic access to research and education networks around the world, as well as to the commodity Internet.
5. To raise awareness among users of the possibilities opened by the deployment of this new facility, by exploiting synergies between key user groups, disseminating interesting use cases and favouring the exchange of information among users of the whole region and between them and their European and worldwide counterparts.