TAM-1

TAM-1 is a 7,200 km submarine cable connecting Caribbean and Central American markets across eight countries, with ten landings from Cancún in Mexico down through Central America and the Caribbean islands, and up through Puerto Rico and Florida. Ready for service in 2025–2026, TAM-1 is built and owned by Trans Americas Fiber (TAF) — a dedicated infrastructure carrier founded specifically to build this cable. With 24 fibre pairs, TAM-1 is one of the highest-capacity new-generation submarine systems landing in the Caribbean region.

The cable is a direct competitor to the older AMX-1 system, which has served similar Caribbean and Atlantic Central American markets since 2014. Where AMX-1 is an América Móvil-owned coastal cable built primarily to serve Claro's regional subsidiaries, TAM-1 is an open-access infrastructure cable: TAF does not itself operate retail services, so it sells capacity to whoever pays — carriers, hyperscalers, content providers — without the retail-competitive tension that complicates Claro's wholesale relationships with customers.

San Juan to Guatemala at 52 ms minimum on a 7,200 km hub cable

Our monitor samples TAM-1 between San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Puerto Barrios (Guatemala). Twenty-six forward-direction samples over thirty days produced:

The minimum of 52 ms is 0.738× the theoretical physics floor for the full 7,200 km cable length. A below-floor measurement is not a paradox — it is the signature of a multi-landing cable where our two measured endpoints are connected by a sub-arc of the cable body, not its full extent. Converting the RTT back to fibre distance, 52 ms corresponds to roughly 5,200 km of light traversal one-way, round-trip — which means our San Juan to Puerto Barrios path is using about 72% of the full cable length.

The great-circle distance from San Juan to Puerto Barrios is roughly 2,100 km. Our measured path is using 5,200 km of fibre, or 2.5× the direct geographic distance. The cable does not take a straight line between the two landings — it threads through several intermediate Caribbean stations on its way. That is the architectural signature of a hub cable built to serve many markets at once rather than to deliver point-to-point latency between any specific pair.

Why 8.9 ms of variance

The forward direction has a standard deviation of 8.9 ms — an order of magnitude more than what we see on cleaner cables like TGN-Western Europe or SPCS/Mistral, both of which held sub-millisecond variance across 15–19 samples. TAM-1 is less consistent for a straightforward reason: it is new. Daily measurements show RTT jumping between ~52 ms clusters and ~83 ms clusters, with individual days shifting between the two. The hop count stays at 10 throughout — meaning the same IP-layer route is being used, but the underlying wavelength or the specific fibre pair is producing different latency.

The most likely cause is that TAF is still in the early capacity-ramp phase for the cable. As carriers light additional fibre pairs and route more traffic onto them, the specific wavelengths our measurements happen to use can shift between different light paths through the same physical cable — with slightly different repeater gain settings, amplifier configurations, and end-to-end optical distances. Over time, as the operator pins traffic onto stable wavelengths, we expect the variance to drop. This is the same cable-adoption-curve pattern we observed on IEX — high RTT variance in the first months of service, converging to low variance after a year or two.

Ten landings across eight countries

Ten landings is dense for a 7,200 km cable — about one landing per 700 km on average. The density reflects TAF's commercial strategy: rather than targeting a single high-volume corridor (as Malbec targets Argentina-Brazil), TAM-1 sells itself as a regional connectivity fabric. Each landing is a separate sales channel: Guatemalan carriers buy capacity to Florida, Colombian carriers buy capacity to Central America, Puerto Rican enterprises buy capacity to the mainland US, and so on. The more landings a cable has, the more bilateral flows it can serve, and the more customers pay for capacity on it.

Two Florida landings (Hollywood and Vero Beach) give the cable two distinct US entry points — a resilience feature that matters when Florida has hurricane risk. If one landing station is affected by a storm, the other can continue to carry traffic.

Trans Americas Fiber as a new category of carrier

TAF represents a relatively new category of submarine cable ownership: the pure-play infrastructure carrier. The company was founded specifically to build TAM-1. It does not own retail customers, does not compete with its capacity buyers, and does not maintain a terrestrial network that feeds the cable. All it does is build and operate fibre on the seabed, and sell capacity wholesale.

This model is a departure from the two older paradigms in Latin American submarine infrastructure: the retail-integrated carrier (América Móvil with AMX-1, Liberty Networks with Fibralink) and the consortium cable (old SAC, APCN-2, SMW4). The pure-play model has been more common in the Atlantic — Telxius is an example, Seaborn Networks another — but until TAM-1 it was not strongly represented in Caribbean and Central American connectivity. For smaller regional ISPs in Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, having a non-retail-competitive capacity provider in the market offers an alternative to negotiating with the incumbent regional carriers.

24 fibre pairs — modern capacity on day one

TAM-1's 24 fibre pairs put it at the upper end of current submarine cable design. For comparison: Marea launched with 8 pairs in 2018, Apricot has 12 pairs (2025), Medusa has 24 pairs (2026). The industry trend toward more fibre pairs per cable is driven by a realization that bandwidth demand keeps growing faster than per-pair capacity upgrades can deliver — so builders now spend the additional capital at construction time to future-proof for a decade of growth.

At 24 pairs and typical 2026 per-pair capacity of 20–25 Tbps, TAM-1 has a design throughput in the range of 500–600 Tbps. That is an order of magnitude more than AMX-1's ~100 Tbps post-upgrades, and it positions TAM-1 to serve the next generation of Caribbean-Central American bandwidth demand for many years before any pair reaches capacity.

What our data proves

• San Juan → Puerto Barrios at 52 ms minimum on a 7,200 km hub cable. 0.738× the full-cable physics floor reflects the sub-arc path between any two landings on a multi-landing system.
• 8.9 ms variance is first-year behaviour. Still-settling wavelength assignments produce higher jitter than mature cables. Expect convergence over the next 12–18 months.
• 24 fibre pairs, pure-play infrastructure carrier. Trans Americas Fiber's model is new for the Caribbean — open-access wholesale capacity without the retail-competitive tension of older carriers.

Try it yourself

Live measurements on the TAM-1 cable page. Compare with the older Caribbean coastal AMX-1 and with the regional Fibralink. The three cables show three generations of Caribbean submarine strategy — consortium (Fibralink, 2006), carrier-owned (AMX-1, 2014), and pure-play infrastructure (TAM-1, 2026) — each answering a different commercial question about who should own undersea fibre.