NEC is beginning construction of the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS), the first subsea fiber optic cable system ever to connect Africa and South America in the southern hemisphere.
SACS will span 6,200 km across the South Atlantic, connecting Luanda, Angola and Fortaleza, Brazil. From Fortaleza, SACS can be connected to another cable system which stretches to Miami Florida. The system will have an initial design capacity of 40 Tpbs (100Gbps x 100 wavelengths x 4 fiber pairs). It will also employ an SDN control plane. Commissioning is expected in the middle of 2018.
SACS is expected to cost $160 million and will be partially co-funded by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) with the support of Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI) through the Banco de Desenvolvimento de Angola (BDA).
“Our main objective is to improve the quality of communications between Africa and the Americas, creating a totally new route in the south hemisphere, providing term and peak capacity product offerings and support for the region’s expanding data requirements of today and for tomorrow,” says Antonio Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables. “SACS will be constructed using state-of-the-art technology, with 100G-coherent design for low latency, reliable delivery for even the most demanding bandwidth needs and direct data centre to data centre connectivity across the Atlantic.”
