The $130-million South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) will reduce latency between Africa and South America from 300 ms to 63 ms once it is completed in mid-2018, says Angola Cables CEO Antonio Nunes.
The cable system, which traverses 6 500 km of the Atlantic between Fortaleza, in Brazil, and Sangano, in Angola, will have four fibre pairs, with 100 Gb/s by 100 Gb/s bandwidth on each pair, providing a total of 40 Tb/s of capacity.
It will also reduce data traffic costs between South America and Asia and improve the efficiency of Internet traffic between Africa and South America and between these continents and North America.
The cable system will dramatically improve connectivity between the continents, but will also provide redundancy for connections between North America and Africa, by means of Angola Cables’ Monet submarine cable, which will connect Santos and Fortaleza, in Brazil, with Miami, in the US, says Nunes.
The 10 550 km, 20 Tb/s Monet cable will be complete by the middle of next year.
“In conjunction with the 14.5 Tb/s West Africa Cable System (WACS) – which traverses the western length of the African continent from Cape Town to London – we will be able to offer complete redundancy of Atlantic connections for our clients.
“The improved connectivity between the continents will help to boost services and business between the countries, and also help to establish Sangona and Fortaleza as connectivity hubs. In Fortaleza, we are building a large data centre, which will boost the information and communication technology ecosystem, specifically as a single point to support businesses in Africa and Brazil.”
The WACS was built by a consortium of 11 telecommunications carriers. Angola Cables manages the cable operations in Angola.
Nunes points out that agriculture, oil and gas, engineering services, telecommunications and science will be key beneficiaries of the improved connectivity as a result of the SACS, noting that expertise from the various territories, such as Brazil’s expertise in agricultural irrigation systems and US expertise in the oil and gas industry, can be leveraged to manage systems remotely and enable international companies to unify their organisations and staff.
The Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project will be able to use the SACS to rapidly share large volumes of data and best practices with the Chilean Very Large Telescope optical telescope, helping to boost science and technology transfers between these premier astronomy projects.
Nunes adds that the full capacity of the new-generation-technology fibre-optic cable was not expected to be used immediately.
However, global experience indicates that excess submarine cable capacity is quickly consumed as Internet penetration grows. Technologies were used to increase the capacity of older submarine cables, highlighting a sound commercial basis for the large capacity of the SACS.