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Africa to connect to Brazil as $160m subsea cable construction gets start date

Africa to connect to Brazil as $160m subsea cable construction gets start date

Photo by Bloomberg

12th November 2014

By: Natasha Odendaal

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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Angola Cables on Wednesday officially launched its $160-million South Atlantic Cable System (Sacs) project that would see a 6 000 km undersea cable cross the Atlantic Ocean bolstering the communications link between Africa and Latin America.

System supplier NEC Corporation was tasked with building the high-speed, high-capacity fibre-optic cable linking the Sangano landing station, in Angola, to Fortaleza, in Brazil, with connections to the rest of the world.

The construction of the four-fibre-pair cable, which boasted an initial design capacity of 40 Tb/s, would kick off at year-end and was scheduled for completion at the end of 2016.

The cable would be interlinked with the Cable of the Americas (Cota), which would connect Africa and Latin America to the US upon completion in 2016, with both Sacs and Cota connecting to the existing West Africa Cable System, which connected Africa to Europe.

The deployment of Sacs was a move aimed at positioning Angola as “one of the major telecommunication hubs” in Africa, Angola Cables CEO António Nunes said.

“The construction of this cable allows us to consolidate Angola Cables’ position as the major driving force behind communications development in Africa and will place us on the map of the global telecommunications scene so that we can invest in some of the world’s biggest growing routes and markets,” he explained.

He added that the company wanted to influence the global telecommunications industry and was “ready to inject some dynamism” into the African technology market.

The Sacs project was expected to incentivise international trade and economic growth between and among African countries and the rest of the world.

It would also aim to meet the growing broadband, mobile, broadcast and enterprise electronic traffic between Africa and Latin America.

However, a new report by Analysys Mason revealed that with seven major new submarine cable systems deployed in sub-Saharan Africa since 2009, with several more planned, terrestrial networks to bring the capacity inland would need to gain traction.

Analysys principal Philip Bates explained that, while the availability of abundant, inexpensive fibre capacity on the coasts of Africa was a “welcome development”, it was not sufficient to enable the provision of broadband services throughout the continent.

African countries needed international terrestrial links to bring connectivity to landlocked countries, along with national fibre networks to link population centres to the international gateways and local broadband networks to deliver “last mile” connectivity.

Despite the majority of countries having “some form” of fibre connectivity to one or more submarine cable landing stations and more than one national fibre network, there was limited competition to stimulate the decrease of pricing.

“According to our research, 35 of the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have no competition among national fibre providers. Eight have limited competition – that is, two providers besides the mobile companies, usually the incumbent fixed-line operator and either the government or the electricity transmission company.

“Only five countries (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe) can be said to have effective competition among multiple players,” he said.

That meant that in countries without effective competition, fibre connectivity often costs five or six times more than at the landing station.

While no single formula could be applied to every country, as the cost of operating a long-distance fibre network was largely fixed and low demand tended to keep prices high, which in turn discouraged take-up, public–private partnerships could be a start towards the development of national connectivity.

“Intervention by governments or international financial organisations can help in this situation,” he said.

Edited by Chanel de Bruyn
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor Online

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