Fibre and FTTP in Brazil in 2025

As a country with a long coastline, fibre – both terrestrial and submarine – forms a vital part of Brazil’s connectivity mix, although there are actually more mobile connections than broadband ones at present. On the subsea side, Fortaleza is emerging as a subsea landing point thanks to its relative proximity to Africa and Europe, with at least 10 cables either operational or planned there, including EllaLink, the only direct link between South America and Europe.

On the terrestrial side, Brazil’s fibre availability is around 82%, helping the country reach an average fixed download speed of 180 Mbps in November 2024 – above countries like South Korea, Sweden and the United Kingdom. This is helped by extensive government investment programmes, for example the Norte Conectado programme that aims to improve connectivity in the rural northern areas of the country. This programme recently delivered a sub-Amazon fibre trunk cable connecting northern Brazil and Colombia, which entered service in July 2024.

The Brazilian fibre market has also been active in consolidation and dealmaking. Neutral fibre provider V.tal’s offer of nearly 6 billion Brazilian real (around $900m) on operator Oi’s fibre assets received regulatory clearance in November 2024, which follows a trend of carrier-neutral operators developing the FTTH market – Telefonica and Canadian fund CDPQ launched the FiBrasil neutral FTTH open access platform in 2021, and as of 2024 was serving over 4 million customers.

One threat on the horizon for market development, however, is trade barriers – the Brazilian government trebled tariffs on fibre optic equipment to 35% in October 2024 as part of a wider campaign against Chinese imports, prompting fibre maker Prysmian to rethink its plans to shut a Sao Paulo manufacturing plant.