Santiago del Estero joins fiber network Capricornio

From the government of Santiago del Estero

(Machine translation)

Santiago del Estero / Buenos Aires, December 30, 2019. With the presence of Gerardo Zamora, Governor of the Province of Santiago del Estero, Gildo Insfrán, Governor of the Province of Formosa, Jorge Capitanich, Governor of the Province of Chaco and Oscar Herrera Ahuad, Governor of the Province of Misiones, was signed in the town of Quimilí the formal entry certificate of the province of Santiago del Estero to the Capricorn Network, the high capacity regional fiber optic network that will improve Internet connectivity from northern Argentina and connect to the world without going through Buenos Aires.

The Capricorn Network is a public-private initiative of federal scope that launched its first stage in April 2019 with the interconnection of the fiber optic networks of Silica Networks (Argentina, Brazil and Chile), Ecom (Chaco, Argentina), Ampernet Telecom (Brazil), Marandu Comunicaciones (Misiones, Argentina) and REFSA Telecomunicaciones (Formosa, Argentina), formed a network of more than 15,000 km. which established on the border between the town of Bernardo de Irigoyen -in Misiones-, and the Brazilian cities of Dionisio Cerqueira -Santa Catarina- and Barracão -Paraná-, a new access point for Argentina's international connectivity, which until now only by the submarine cables that emerge in the town of Las Toninas in the Province of Buenos Aires.

As part of the unprecedented milestone that means the union of individual efforts towards a collective objective, the inhabitants of much of the vast territory of northern Argentina will be able to access quality broadband connectivity and be part of the regional pole of technological development and of the knowledge economy that will be possible from the development of this fiber optic infrastructure

The provincial network of Enerse will connect with the Capricorn Network during the first quarter of 2020 through a line that will arrive from the Ecom Chaco node in the town of Gancedo to the border with Santiago del Estero. So Chaco, Formosa, Misiones and Santiago del Estero will be linked with Brazil and the exit to the Atlantic Ocean via Pato Branco, San Pablo, Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza. In a second stage, which is already underway, the Capricorn Network will complete its journey north to connect with Paraguay and west to cross into Chile and connect with the submarine cables that arrive through the Pacific Ocean.

Thus, by connecting to the world through submarine cables that reach both the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean, the Network will form a key piece of regional Internet infrastructure, providing broadband connectivity to the provinces of northern Argentina, the Chilean north, southern Brazil and the main cities of Paraguay. It is a service basin with a potential reach of more than 26 million people in four countries.

The union of individual efforts translates into a more robust telecommunications market, with the possibility of reaching places where there was no connectivity before and will favor the establishment of new investments in the region, promoting the creation of productive ventures and other initiatives based on knowledge and ICTs, which require high capacity and low latency connectivity to develop their full potential.