South Atlantic’s first undersea cable will connect Brazil, Angola

Despite a bunch of noble efforts involving satellites, drones, and weather balloons, we still depend pretty heavily on undersea cables for the majority our internet access. It’s still a pretty major deal therefore when a new major undersea cable gets launched. It’s an even bigger deal when said cable is set to connect two of the world’s most underserved regions, as is the case with the one Angola Cables and NEC are set to build across the South Atlantic.

The project, which was announced today, will be known as the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) and will connect Angola and Brazil and will link the rest of Africa with Latin America for the first time.

According to Angola Cables and NEC, SACS will enable fast speed and high capacity international data transmissions from one continent to the next, incentivising international trade and economic growth between and amongst South Africa, Africa and the rest of the globe.

Read more: $1.5bn Undersea cable to link BRICS by 2014

The two companies claim that SACS will feature “the latest high quality 4-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies with an initial design capacity of 40Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 4 fiber-pairs) in order to meet the growing broadband, mobile, broadcast and enterprise electronic traffic between the two continents”.

The total investment amount for SACS is estimated to be approximately US$160-million.

According to Angola Cables CEO, António Nunes, the company’s mission is to transform Angola into one of the major telecommunication hubs in Africa:

“Africa is one of the continents with the highest growth rate of internet users, so our commitment is to give users the best and most effective technological innovation solution to this escalating need. 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. We want to influence the worldwide telecommunications industry and are ready to inject some dynamism into the African technology market.”

Read more: Undersea cables set to launch African bandwidth explosion

The cable system will be built from Sangano landing station in Angola to Fortaleza in Brazil. The system will then be linked to the Cable of the Americas (COTA), another recently announced cable system construction that will connect Africa and Latin America to the United States of America. SACS and COTA will then tap into the existing West Africa Cable System (WACS) which links Africa to Europe.

Construction of SACS is expected to begin before the end of the year and if all goes according to plan, the system will be ready for use at the end of 2016