In September 2026, EllaLink announced that two subsea branching units had been laid off Brazil's north coast, one for a future branch to São Luís in Maranhão and one for Salinópolis in Pará. Alcatel Submarine Networks made and installed them, at depths of about 3,690 m and 3,920 m. The two Brazilian branches are planned to offer an initial combined capacity of about 17 Tbps, according to EllaLink's announcement as reported by Total Telecom. It is modest hardware, but it is the first physical step toward moving Brazil's landing points off a very crowded stretch of coastline.
What was actually installed
Precision matters here. A branching unit is a passive splitter on the seabed. It lets a future branch cable join a trunk without another deepwater intervention on the main route. The branch cables themselves are not built. According to the same report, the states of Pará and Maranhão must still finalise funding before marine surveys begin, and preliminary permitting and environmental assessments are underway.
The units sit on Lum@link, a roughly 2,100 km extension linking a new landing station in Cayenne, French Guiana, to EllaLink's existing trunk off Fortaleza, per EllaLink's own project release. EllaLink says the system is on track to be ready for service by the end of 2026. The Amazon branches have no such date.
The case for stronger rules
The strongest argument for regulatory intervention is a fair one. Anatel opened a request for input (Tomada de Subsídios nº 2/2026) on 26 May 2026. In reporting on it, Teletime says Anatel notes that 99% of Brazil's international data traffic passes over submarine cables. It also describes the geographic concentration of landings in four places: Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, Santos and Praia Grande. A storm, an anchor strike, a sabotage attempt or a single-site cyber compromise near one of those clusters could affect a disproportionate share of the country's international capacity. Markets do not price that kind of systemic risk well, because the cost of an outage falls on everyone, not just on the cable owner. A regulator that takes the problem seriously is doing its job.
The consultation is broad. Per DPL News, it covers physical and cybersecurity requirements, monitoring, certification models for international operators, and the links between cables and data centres. Anatel expects to complete its regulatory impact analysis by the end of 2026. Contributions went through Anatel's Participa Anatel portal.
Where the risk of overreach lies
The EllaLink units also show what diversification looks like when it works. It happened because a private operator, two state governments and outside funders each had a reason to put a landing somewhere new. The Amazon branches serve a region that is short on international capacity, so they bring a commercial and developmental return as well as resilience. Nobody ordered it.
A rule that simply forced operators to land away from the existing cluster would work differently. It would raise costs on routes that are cheap to build and cheap to repair, since Fortaleza, Rio and Santos have terrestrial backhaul, data centres and repair logistics. It could also push investment toward other jurisdictions. Brazil competes with other South Atlantic and Caribbean hubs for new capacity, and a heavy licensing burden would hand those hubs an advantage.
The branching units point to a lighter approach with three parts.
- Make diversification the easy option. Faster, more predictable licensing for new landing stations, including the environmental review that the north-coast branches still face, matters more than any quota. Delay at that stage is the real tax on new landings.
- Mandate outcomes, not locations. Minimum physical and cyber protection standards, incident reporting and shared repair capacity address the risk directly, whichever beach a cable lands on.
- Treat co-financing as a tool. The Pará and Maranhão funding gap is a problem for public finance. Blended funding from states, development banks and operators can close it without turning Anatel into a site planner.
What to watch
The hard part is yet to come. Funding has to be finalised, marine surveys run, and permits issued before a single metre of branch cable is laid. Nothing in the September announcement guarantees that happens on schedule. If it stalls, the failure will not be a lack of mandates. It will be the usual friction of financing, surveys and licensing across federal, state and environmental authorities.
That is where Anatel's rulemaking can help most. Security standards that are proportionate and clear, combined with licensing timelines operators can plan around, would let more projects like Lum@link's Brazilian branches reach financial close. Heavy-handed location rules would reduce the odds that they do. The branching units are a cheap option that has now been bought. The regulatory question is whether Brazil's rules will help it be exercised.
One caution on evidence. Capacity figures such as the 17 Tbps initial branch capacity are operator planning figures, not measured traffic, and the concentration risk is described in Anatel's framing as a systemic vulnerability rather than a quantified outage probability. A good rulemaking should ask for that quantification before it prescribes remedies.