City nets millions from undersea cables that zip along data
Tentacles of undersea cables reach out to global destinations from Boca Raton’s Spanish River and Silver Palm parks. This map shows how the seven existing cables stretch thousands of miles across the hemispheres. Map provided
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By Jane Musgrave
When Boca Raton officials gave a European-based company the go-ahead to use Spanish River Park as a landing spot for a 1,200-mile undersea fiber-optic cable that would stretch to Cancun and Guatemala and possibly beyond, some city residents cringed.
“Why are we going to compromise one of our main beaches?” asked Jon Pearlman, founder of the Save Boca citizens group and a recently announced City Council candidate. “This is our land. Don’t approve this tonight.”
What many city residents don’t realize is that the cable that the council approved in September won’t be the first to make landfall at the popular 95-acre park that extends from the Intracoastal Waterway to the Atlantic Ocean.
Five already exist and plans are underway for an additional three, including the one that was recently approved, according to TeleGeography, a company that maps fiber-optic cables across the globe.
Another two extend from Silver Palm Park, along the Intracoastal south of Palmetto Park Road — including one owned by Globenet Cabos Submarinos America — and one more, not on TeleGeography’s radar, is planned for Spanish River Park, city officials said.
That means 11 cables will extend from Boca Raton, one of the largest number in Florida and among the most on the eastern seaboard.
Why Boca Raton?
The cables that are sunken and buried are part of a vast invisible global network that has put Boca Raton on the map as an undersea fiber-optic hub. The longest one, installed in 2001, is 15,500 miles long, stopping in Puerto Rico and Guatemala before winding its way along both sides of South America.
The cables are the roads of the information highway, carrying 99% of global internet and telecommunication traffic, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Exactly how Boca Raton became a hot spot for the cables is unclear.
Some have suggested that as the former home of IBM and the birthplace of the personal computer, the city had a natural affinity for telecommunications.
But Brandon Schaad, director of development services for the city, said he suspects Boca Raton became a magnet for fiber-optic cables when significant divisions of the now defunct Tyco International were headquartered in the city some 20 years ago.
Tyco was an early pioneer in the fiber-optics industry, designing, building and installing networks throughout the world, and was one of the first to lay a cable from the city.
“Tyco had a good relationship with the city,” Schaad said. Most important, he said, then city leaders envisioned the long-term benefits of attracting fiber-optic cable companies.
The financial rewards are indisputable. If the Spanish-based Telxius wins approval from state and federal agencies for its latest cable, it will pay the city nearly $2.7 million for the easement it got to use less than half an acre in Spanish River Park.
Over the years, payments from various companies and consortiums have added millions to the city’s coffers.
Minimal impact, official says
As what Schaad called an “early mover” in the industry, the city also is home to two processing centers that receive the information that streams through the undersea cables at the speed of light. The centers transmit the information to a vast network of underground cables.
The two 15,000-square-feet-plus communication substations — one on South Dixie Highway and Southeast Sixth Street, and another on West Rogers Circle in the South Congress Industrial Center off Clint Moore Road — are the ultimate landing points for data transmitted by the undersea cables. Both were built roughly 20 years ago.
From 1998 to 2000, the one on Rogers Circle was owned by Tyco.
While Pearlman and others worried about construction disrupting park activities, Schaad said few will notice when crews arrive next year to lay cable from Boca Raton’s banks. Disruptions from the installations are minimal as are the effects on the environment, he said.
City Manager George Brown, now emeritus, has been with the city for 43 years and has watched other cable projects.
“I’m going to give a very non-engineering description,” he said before the council in September approved the easement for Telxius. “They essentially open up a manhole and directionally bore where the cable needs to be.”
Schaad agreed. “It’s not excavating,” he said. “It’s very low intensity. The impact is very, very minimal.”
Because the first lines were installed more than 20 years ago, some of the infrastructure is already in place.
For instance, in its plans to install another undersea cable at Spanish River Park in 2027, Telxius says once it hits land the cable will run through vacant ducts that were installed years ago. The so-called CELIA cable will link Boca to Puerto Rico, Aruba, Martinique and Antigua. In about five years, the company also plans to install a third cable, using the same easement.
An invisible technology
Both of Telxius’ planned cables — TIKAL-AMX3 and CELIA — will have to be approved by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And, Schaad said, requests aren’t rubber stamped.
Telxius’ initial plans to run the cable for TIKAL-AMX3 through an off-shore sand pit that is used to renourish city beaches was a no-go, Schaad said. Ditto any plans to disrupt off-shore reefs.
The company was required to run the cable north to miss sensitive marine habitat and the sand borrow area before curving it south to reach Central and possibly South America if the company decides to extend the line another roughly 1,000 miles to Colombia.
Still, at least one council member was skeptical about the use of the park for undersea cables.
Council member Andy Thomson cast the lone vote against granting the easement to Telxius. He said he didn’t have enough information to support it, noting that it appears to benefit residents of Central America rather than people who live in Boca Raton.
“I don’t recall us approving something like this in my time here,” said Thomson, who was first elected in 2018. “So this is putting me in a spot where I have too many questions to be able to vote on it.”
Schaad said he understands that people don’t fully grasp the invisible technology. Before he became development services director in 2016, he said he had no idea how many undersea cables landed in the city.
Once he learned about the networks that crisscross the globe, he said he realized how the city figured into the worldwide internet picture.
“Oh, wow,” he remembered thinking, “this is why the internet is so fast. It’s an incredible infrastructure.”
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