Sparkle and Entel Bolivia launch a new digital route across South America

The Memorandum of Understanding signed at ITW in Washington between Sparkle and Entel Bolivia is far from routine. It represents a major move to redirect internet infrastructure across South America via Bolivia, with substantial implications for data centre operators, cloud providers, and OTT platforms throughout the region.

The centrepiece of the agreement is the Bio-Oceanic Digital Corridor: a unified terrestrial backbone spanning approximately 4,370 kilometres across Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, linking Lima to São Paulo. Rather than stitching together fragmented routing architectures, the two operators are positioning this as a single, high-capacity digital corridor that can scale to 60 Tbps.

The latency numbers are the headline. Where traditional submarine routes between the Pacific and Atlantic coasts stretch beyond 12,000 kilometres, inducing round-trip delays in excess of 120 milliseconds, the new terrestrial route targets sub-60ms performance between Lima and São Paulo. For the cloud gaming platforms and real-time streaming services driving Latin America’s digital economy, that difference is not marginal, it is the difference between a product that works and one that does not.

“We are proud to collaborate with Entel Bolivia on this ambitious project, which reflects our shared vision to accelerate the region’s digital integration and support the growth of gaming, OTT services and cloud-based solutions across Latin America,” said Enrico Bagnasco, CEO of Sparkle.

Why Bolivia, and why now?

The timing is no accident. Latin America’s digital entertainment sector has expanded rapidly in recent years, with Brazil functioning as the dominant hub for game development, content distribution, and hosting infrastructure. Yet much of western South America has historically depended on indirect international routes to reach the Atlantic, adding latency and vulnerability to every digital transaction that crosses the continent.

Bolivia’s geography, long viewed as a commercial liability for a landlocked nation, becomes a strategic asset here. Sitting at the geographic heart of South America, it offers the shortest overland path between the two oceans. Entel Bolivia will contribute its existing terrestrial backbone, which spans national and cross-border segments underpinned by more than 44,000 kilometres of fibre, connecting Lurín in Peru with Puerto Quijarro on the Bolivian-Brazilian border. Sparkle then manages the Brazilian segment onward into São Paulo.

The commercial structure is deliberately flexible. Customers – gaming companies, ISPs, OTT platforms, digital service providers, and data centres – can access capacity through either partner, with a revenue-sharing arrangement to be finalised in a subsequent agreement. That bilateral access model matters for multinational operators who want a single throat to choke but do not want to be locked into one provider’s reach on either side of the continent.

Jorge del Solar, General Manager of Entel Bolivia, commented: “This initiative consolidates Bolivia’s position as a digital corridor in South America, enabling the efficient interconnection of the Pacific and Atlantic digital ecosystems, and unlocking new opportunities for the development of high-capacity digital services across the region.”

Sparkle’s broader infrastructure push

The Bolivia corridor does not exist in isolation. It forms part of an accelerating infrastructure build-out that has seen Sparkle make a series of notable moves in recent months, each reinforcing its position as one of the few truly global operators capable of orchestrating end-to-end connectivity across multiple continents.

In February 2026, Sparkle unveiled GreenMed, a new subsea cable system in the Central-Eastern Mediterranean, developed in partnership with Alcatel Submarine Networks and Elettra Tlc. Designed to strengthen diversification and low-latency connectivity for carriers, cloud and content players, GreenMed complements the operator’s existing BlueMed system. Bagnasco described it as “another concrete step in Sparkle’s strategy to strengthen the Mediterranean basin as a key digital gateway,” with the first segments expected to be operational by late 2028.

That same month, Sparkle announced it had agreed to land the Barracuda subsea cable 9the first direct Spain-Italy submarine cable) at its Genoa Landing Platform, in partnership with Valencia Digital Port Connect. The 1,070km cable, backed by a €100 million investment, is designed with an open cable system architecture featuring 12 fibre pairs, each with a capacity of 32 Tbps.

Back in December 2025, Sparkle expanded its footprint in Chile with a new Point of Presence in Santiago (its 54th in the Americas), co-located at the Ascenty data centre campus. The 400GBE-enabled node integrates with Sparkle’s global Tier-1 IP backbone, Seabone, and benefits directly from the Curie submarine cable connecting Chile to California.

And in November 2025, Sparkle launched its STLS-AI quantum-safe framework. A tool designed for secure interactions between AI agents that eliminates the need for centralised authorities. Scheduled for commercial release by end of 2026, it signals Sparkle’s ambition to move beyond raw connectivity into the emerging AI infrastructure layer.

Bagnasco was re-elected as chair of the Global Leaders’ Forum at ITW 2026 for a further two-year term running to May 2028, a role he described as a mandate “to continue accelerating the deployment of advanced digital infrastructure and to promote a shared vision of international carriers as the ‘AI backbone’ of global connectivity.” The GLF counts more than 170 member organisations across the global carrier and digital infrastructure community.

Bagnasco first assumed the chair role in June 2025, leading the organisation through a transitional period in its leadership.

Following a formal board vote, his mandate has been extended as the GLF moves into what it describes as its next phase of strategic development. Nabil Baccouche, group chief carrier and wholesale officer at UAE-based operator e&, was simultaneously re-appointed as vice chair for the same two-year term.

The Sparkle-Entel Bolivia corridor addresses several pain points simultaneously. Route diversity, long the Achilles heel of regional networks dependent on a small number of submarine cable systems, improves materially when a high-capacity terrestrial alternative exists. The corridor’s redundant architecture, combining Entel Bolivia’s fibre backbone with Sparkle’s São Paulo gateway, provides a genuine alternative path for traffic that currently has nowhere else to go if a cable system goes down.

The 60 Tbps design capacity is another signal. At that scale, the corridor is being built for the AI and cloud era, not merely to patch current demand. As inference workloads, real-time financial services, and IoT applications multiply across the region, operators will need infrastructure that can absorb significant traffic growth without re-engineering.

Sparkle, which owns and operates more than 600,000 kilometres of fibre spanning Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas and Asia, is one of the few operators with the geographic footprint to manage both ends of such a corridor. With TIM’s Italian Treasury-led consortium closing its acquisition of the company, expected in the first half of 2026, Sparkle enters this next chapter of Latin American expansion with renewed institutional backing and a clear mandate to grow.

The Bio-Oceanic Digital Corridor is, in that context, precisely what its name implies: infrastructure for a region that is finally being connected as a whole, rather than assembled coast by coast.

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