As news emerged this week on a new submarine cable system that will connect South Africa and Brazil, another major project — the South Atlantic Cable System (Sacs) — is nearing completion.
The Sacs cable, a project led by Angola Cables, will be the first submarine system to connect Africa with South America. The company will soon begin laying the deep-water section.
The fibre-optic cable is being supplied by Japan’s NEC, with France’s Orange Marine laying it on the ocean bed. It is expected to be fully operational before mid-2018. The deep-water phase of the installation will last 90 days and cover 6 200 km of cable at depths of up to 5km.
“When Sacs is complete, together with the complementary infrastructure offered by the Wacs and Monet cable systems, there will be a paradigm shift in global telecommunications data transport,” said Angola Cables CEO António Nunes in a statement.
The cable system will provide a more direct route to the US for South African Internet users. Currently, traffic to the US is routed via Europe and then across the north Atlantic.
“With Sacs in place, wholesale customers between the continents will see a five-fold improvement in latency, as well as better access to America, one of the largest producers and aggregators of digital content and services.”
The cable forms part of a plan by Angola to become “one of the telecoms hubs in sub-Saharan Africa”.
“Investments in underwater cable systems and data centres are creating digital bridges bringing continents closer, but also improving access to major international telecoms circuits,” Nunes said. “We expect various economic benefits for Angola, as well as other regions where our network exists, with a number of knock-on effects, including further investment from technology companies requiring high levels of connectivity.” — © 2017 NewsCentral Media
