The South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) has made landfall at Fortaleza on the Brazilian coast.
António Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables, comments on the arrival and installation of SACS on the Brazilian coast. “It is an important strategic milestone for the company, Angola and Africa as it will be the first direct link between the Americas and the African continent, offering a faster routing with higher capacity.”
Now entering the final phase of completion, SACS is expected to be fully operational by the third quarter of 2018. The undersea cable is one of the most advanced submarine telecommunications systems and will have initial capacity of 40Tbps (100Gbps x 100 wavelength x four pairs of fibre).
“Once SACS has been fully commissioned, we will see a significant improvement in communications and content sharing between Angola, African countries and the Americas. With SACS, the delay in transporting digital content, known as latency, will be reduced fivefold, from the current 350 thousandths of a second to just over 60 thousandths of a second,” Nunes adds.
“Investments made by Angola Cables and its partners in underwater cable systems, such as the West African Cable System (WACS) and Monet – connecting North and South America – combined with other investments in terrestrial infrastructure such as data centres, is opening up global communications networks,” he says. “It is also reorienting worldwide internet traffic and is effectively positioning Angola as a telecommunications hub in sub-Saharan Africa.”