Angola Cables has taken a step closer to completion of the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) with the official launch in Sangano, Angola.
SACS, a subsea cable with 40Tbps capacity that will extend more than 6 500 km to Fortaleza in Brazil, is the first direct link between Africa and South America.
Installation has begun on the Angolan coast in the municipality of Quissama.
The SACS system is being constructed by NEC.
António Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables, comments: “For Angolans, the time to access content available in America – the largest centre for the production and aggregation of digital content and services – will improve fivefold.”
Currently it takes approximately 300 milliseconds to connect between Angola and Brazil. With SACS, the latency – the time lag between a data packet being sent and received – is expected to be reduced to approximately 60 milliseconds.
“Angola is becoming one of the telecommunications hubs in sub-Saharan Africa,” adds Nunes. “Current cable systems, such as WACS, together with the SACS and Monet cables systems – complemented by local data centres – will improve connectivity, but also economically benefit Angola and the surrounding regions as technology companies requiring high connectivity establish and grow their operations in Africa.”
The installation phase of the cable on the Angolan shore is one of the most important aspects of the project as several levels of interaction and activity are required with several entities simultaneously, and therefore constitute a critical and high risk moment.