Angola Cables has announced plans for a point of presence in Cape Town, its second in the country after Johannesburg, as the company gets ready to serve the market with the new South Atlantic Cable System (Sacs), a new submarine cable that will connect the west coast of Africa and Brazil from mid-2018.

The Cape Town POP will be opened by the end of 2017, the company, which is headquartered in Luanda, said on Wednesday. It already has a POP in Teraco’s data centre on Johannesburg’s East Rand.

“Increasing demand has resulted in Angola Cables’ decision to develop a POP infrastructure for customers based, or with operations in, Cape Town,” it said in a statement.

“This expansion will give us the ability to attend to local Internet and content demands, as well as enhancing our peering activities in the region,” said product manager Darwin Cost.

News of the planned Cape Town POP comes after Angola Cables said on Tuesday that the Sacs project is nearing completion.

Sacs 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.

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. — (c) 2017 NewsCentral Media