Bicentenario

Overview

Bicentenario is a short regional submarine cable connecting Argentina and Uruguay across the Río de la Plata corridor. Spanning 250 km, it provides a direct fiber-optic link between the two countries and is jointly owned by their respective national telecommunications operators.

Route and Landings

In Argentina, the cable lands at Las Toninas, a coastal locality in Buenos Aires Province that serves as one of the country's established submarine cable landing sites.

In Uruguay, the cable lands at Maldonado, on the country's Atlantic coast east of Montevideo.

Ownership and Operators

Bicentenario is jointly owned by Antel Uruguay and Telecom Argentina. Antel is Uruguay's state-owned telecommunications provider, while Telecom Argentina is one of Argentina's principal fixed-line and broadband carriers. The bilateral ownership structure reflects the cable's purpose as a direct link between the two countries' national networks.

Technical Profile

No technical specifications such as fiber pairs, design capacity, or supplier information are available for Bicentenario.

Status and Timeline

Bicentenario entered service in 2011 and has been operational for approximately 15 years. It remains in service connecting Argentina and Uruguay.

Regional Context

Within the Argentina–Uruguay cable corridor, Bicentenario sits alongside a small number of other systems. Unisur, which also connects Argentina and Uruguay at 265 km and entered service in 1995, is the closest parallel in both geography and scale. Longer regional cables such as South American Crossing (SAC, 20,000 km, RFS 2000), South America-1 (SAm-1, 25,000 km, RFS 2001), and Malbec (2,880 km, RFS 2021) serve broader intercontinental or continental routes that extend well beyond this bilateral corridor. At 250 km, Bicentenario is longer than 20% of the cables touching the same countries, reflecting its character as a short, focused intra-regional link rather than a long-haul system.

Measured performance over the past 60 days, based on 46 ping tests, shows an average round-trip latency of 18.8 ms, with a best recorded result of 7.0 ms. These figures are consistent with the cable's short physical length.

Strategic Role

Bicentenario provides a dedicated bilateral fiber path between Argentina and Uruguay, connecting the two countries' national telecommunications infrastructures at landing points on opposite sides of the Río de la Plata estuary. Uruguay has only two submarine cables landing at a single landing point, making Maldonado the country's sole submarine cable entry point and giving Bicentenario a direct role in Uruguay's international fiber connectivity alongside Unisur. For Argentina, the Las Toninas landing point consolidates connectivity with multiple other systems, positioning Bicentenario as one of several cables serving the Argentine coast.