Boca Raton is a Hub For International Submarine Cables; A New One Will Soon Be Laid

Many Boca Raton residents drive past the non-descript building on South Dixie Highway every day where, inside, unfathomable amounts of digital data are transferred between two continents – carried by undersea cables – every second of every day. Until recently, even more residents were unaware that the city has served as a major point of international connectivity for 25 years.

The empty-looking, cream-colored building at 500 S. Dixie Highway is a data center where major telecommunications providers across the western hemisphere link their customers to the world. The conduits that carry fiber optic cables run from the building, under city streets, across the intracoastal waterway, and ultimately beneath Spanish River Park and South Beach Park into the Atlantic Ocean, where they then extend for thousands of miles before landing on Caribbean islands, and cities in Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil.

Boca Raton will soon be home to a new “ultrahigh capacity” submarine fiber optic cable through an existing piece of conduit that has had its landing in Spanish River Park since 2000. News of what will be known as the “AMX-3” connection between Boca Raton and Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, (with an offshoot to Cancun, Mexico), made headlines in business publications in Latin America last year when it was announced, but close to home, the proposal went largely unnoticed. Over the last few weeks, however, debate over transferring public property to developers for the embattled government campus project led some residents to question a small item on a city council agenda authorizing an easement for the new cable.

A datacenter at 500 S. Dixie Highway, Boca Raton, FL. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

The location where a new cable will come ashore in Boca Raton. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

The location where a new cable will come ashore in Boca Raton. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

To be clear, the city is not selling park land to América Móvil or Telxius, the companies behind the new fiber optic cable. The easement only gives the companies the right to run their cables underneath property that the city already owns, and will continue to own. Residents, officials say, are unlikely to ever notice the project, and Spanish River Park will not be disturbed by the addition of the new cable since it uses an existing conduit that has been in place for 25 years. The city council, this week, authorized the sale of easement access to Telxius for $2,684,000. Florida law – as well as federal telecommunications statutes – effectively give the city little wiggle room to deny the application had it chosen to do so, but officials said the revenue from the easement sale can be reinvested into town while residents will see no physical change.

“It’s been there for decades, and nobody has any idea that there is a major datacenter with all of these cables going across the ocean to downtown Boca,” said Planning Board member Timothy Dornblaser, after some residents began questioning whether the city was selling a portion of the park.

One resident at the meeting asked for a rendering of what the “project” will look like when completed, leaving officials puzzled. There were no renderings because nothing will change, they said; the cables are all located underground, and the conduit in which they will run was laid a quarter-century ago.

“There is an access point that is already in existence for the existing cables,” said Erin Sita, Deputy Director of Development Services for the city. “They’re connecting to that access point, that then distributes to the city’s rights-of-way through existing conduit that is there.”

The location where a new cable will come ashore in Boca Raton. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

With assurances that the addition of a new cable will be unseen, the granting of the easement passed muster with the planning board unanimously. The city council followed the board’s recommendation this week, though Councilman Andy Thomson abstained from the vote since he said he did not have enough information on the matter.

The addition of the new cable provides a rare opportunity for discussion on Boca Raton’s status as an international tech hub. Well known for its connection to IBM in the past, the city is also one of several South Florida communities where undersea cables come ashore, much in the same way trans-Atlantic cables connecting the United States and Europe do the same in little-known beach towns along the Jersey Shore and the Delmarva peninsula. While landline phones have become something of an anachronism in recent years, mobile data must originate somewhere, and many may not realize that the internet and wireless connections largely exist on the backs of physical cables that transmit and receive gargantuan amounts of data under the world’s oceans and seas.

In Boca Raton, the new AMX-3 cable will carry a staggering 190 terabytes of data per second, which will jump to 380 terabytes once more fiber is added. The physical cable will be supplied by Alcatel Submarine Networks, a subsidiary of the French telecom giant that has contracted with their Latin American counterparts. Boca Raton is also home to another undersea cable owned by Madrid-based telecommunications giant Telefónica, which runs 3,700 kilometers from the city to Aruba, Martinique, Antigua, and Puerto Rico.

The AMX-3 cable is expected to begin operating by the end of the year. The system will improve connectivity in the Guatemalan market and help support the requirements of the new generation of mobile technology after 5G services were launched in the country by carriers Claro and Tigo. Guatamala, by way of its connection to Boca Raton, will become the first country in Central America to boast a fully built-out 5G mobile network.

The location where a new cable will come ashore in Boca Raton. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

The physical conduit for the cables in Boca Raton comes ashore near the southern driveway of Spanish River Park, then crosses the ICW and runs through an existing path to the downtown datacenter on Dixie Highway. Yet another datacenter is located in the northern portion of the city off Congress Avenue, and another landing is located closer to South Beach Park.

With the city having approved the easement, Telxius will now be able to apply for a permit from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for final approval. Sita said the company will have until sometime in the spring of 2026 to receive their permit, at which point the city will begin receiving several rounds of payments that will add up to the $2,684,000 easement value. In terms of actual construction, it is unlikely anyone will ever notice the fiber optic cable being physically led into the conduit.

“They simply open a manhole, and directionally bore where the cable will go,” said City Manager George S. Brown. “It will be flat to the ground, just as the others are.”