The principle impact of BELLA-S for research and education collaboration between Europe and Latin America is the ability to meet long-term transatlantic connectivity needs for European and Latin American research and education collaboration:
- Capacity needs are met and exceeded, with scalable upgrade paths with known pricing principles, leading to long-term cost efficiencies.
- A significant reduction in latency between the two regions, leading to improved support for collaborations where low latency is of prime importance (e.g. metrology, earth sciences, medicine and the arts).
- Improved protection and privacy of traffic: BELLA traffic is routed directly between the two regions, without being directed via third countries or regions; where traffic is specifically sensitive, dedicated channels can be used to increase security of traffic.
- Copernicus is made available locally in Latin America in near real time by the transfer of Copernicus data to mirror sites in Latin America via BELLA.
Other wider impacts include the following:
EllaLink is a new submarine cable system between Europe and Brazil, and thereby improves internet access in general for Brazil and the wider South America society. In addition, with landings in Madeira and Cabo Verde, it also increases internet access in those locations. As an anchor tenant of the EllaLink cable system, BELLA is a key enabler of EllaLink.
In addition to the confirmed deployments, possible branch extensions of the EllaLink system include the Canary Islands in Spain, Mauritania, Morocco, French Guiana and, within Brazil, Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo, which would bring improved digital access benefits to those locations.
BELLA has brought together funding from multiple sources to successfully achieve a goal common to multiple parties. BELLA has therefore served as a proof of concept that such programmes are achievable and provides best practices for similar activities in the future, such as the EC’s plans for
Global Gateways.
GÉANT, RedCLARA and RNP have collaborated with R&E networking partners in North America and Africa to secure a back-up connectivity arrangement that is beneficial for all participating R&E networking partners, and the research and education communities of four continents.
This arrangement follows similar arrangements in the North Atlantic and between Asia-Pacific and Europe.
BELLA therefore not only provides for Europe-Latin America R&E connectivity but also contributes to the strengthening of the wider global R&E networking ecosystem, in a mesh that ensures greater availability of R&E capacity for when inevitable network outages occur.
In June 2020 EllaLink announced that a facility would be deployed on a dedicated fibre of the branch of the EllaLink cable system to Madeira specifically for scientific use. This provides potential for developing a testbed to support wider technologies to collect earth observation data from the seabed, in addition to Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS).
