The first subsea fiber optic cable system to connect Africa and South America in the southern hemisphere is now live and open for commercial traffic, operator Angola Cables said this week, two and a half years after construction began.
Japan’s NEC Corporation began work on the 6,200 kilometre, $160 million South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) in April 2016. The project was partially funded by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC). The cable opened for business Thursday.
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It directly links Fortaleza, Brazil, with Angolan capital Luanda and will enable high speed and large capacity international data transmissions from Africa to the Americas, boosting current speeds five-fold.
It will reduce latency between the Brazil and Angola from 350ms to 63ms
From Fortaleza, SACS can also be connected to another cable system which stretches to Miami Florida, enabling Angola and Africa to connect directly with the US.
Angola Cables: Boost for Regional Economies, Further Connectivity
António Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables said that the commercialisation of the cable is “more than a game-changer” when it comes to data connectivity and services between the two continents. He said in a release Thursday: “By developing and connecting ecosystems that allows for local IP traffic to be exchanged locally and regionally, the efficiency of networks that are serving the Southern Hemisphere can be vastly improved. As these developments progress, they will have considerable impact for the future growth and configuration of the global internet.”
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NEC said in an earlier statement that “SACS will feature the latest optical technologies to provide the most advanced subsea telecommunications system, coupled with a control plane based on innovative Software-Defined Networking technology to serve bandwidth-intensive applications. SACS will have an initial design capacity of 40Tpbs (100Gbps x 100 wavelengths x 4 fiber pairs).”
