wiredInUSA November 2018

Securing southern connections M A K I N G T H E NEWS

Two and a half years after construction began, the first subsea fiber opticcable system to connect Africa and South America in the southern hemisphere is open for commercial traffic. Japan’s NEC Corporation began work on the 6,200km, $160 million South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) in April 2016, on behalf of the operator, Angola Cables. It directly links Fortaleza, Brazil, with Angolan capital Luanda, and brings a five-fold increase in speed for large capacity international data transmissions from Africa to the Americas. It will reduce latency between Brazil and Angola from 350ms to 63ms. From Fortaleza, SACS can be connected to another cable system to Florida, enabling Angola and Africa to connect directly with the US.

António Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables, said: “By developing and connecting ecosystems that allow for local IP traffic to be exchanged locally and regionally, the efficiency of networks that are serving the southern hemisphere can be vastly improved.” An NEC statement explained 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 40Tbps (100Gbps x 100 wavelengths x 4 fiber pairs).”

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wiredInUSA - November 2018