LUANDA, ANGOLA — Angola Cables announced Thursday an important milestone as installation of the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) officially began on the Angolan coast this week, bringing the transatlantic communications cable project closer to completion.
The official launch in Sangano, Angola, initiated the installation phase of the SACS cable on the Angolan coast in the municipality of Quissama. Being constructed by NEC Corporation, SACS is a sub-Atlantic cable with 40 Tbps (terabytes per second) of capacity that will extend more than 6,500 kilometres between Fortaleza, Brazil, and Sangano, Angola. SACS is the first direct link between South America and Africa.
When the entire network is completed, along with associated elements such as data centres and Internet exchange points, SACS will offer “a paradigm shift in Africa’s telecommunications sector,” Angola Cables said in a press release. The installation of SACS is considered a strategic project for Angola to advance the region’s digital economy and to improve global communications, the press release said.
According to António Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables: “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, the company said. With SACS, the network latency is expected to be reduced to approximately 60 milliseconds, according to Angola Cables.
“Angola is becoming one of the telecommunications hubs in sub-Saharan Africa,” Nunes added, in the press release. “Current cable systems, such as WACS (West Africa Cable System), 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 tech companies requiring high connectivity establish and grow their operations in Africa.”
The Monet subsea cable system is another Angola Cables project, which will connect Brazil and the United States when it is complete, allowing the three continents of South America, North America and Africa to be interconnected when all of the submarine cable systems and supporting data centres are fully operational.
“The installation of SACS represents the realization of a dream, a development that reflects our ability to find solutions and overcome challenges, always having in mind the final objective,” Nunes said.
