Angola Cables’ SACS System Linking Americas and Africa Goes Live

The South Atlantic Cable System (SACS), connecting Africa and the Americas, has now come on stream and it’s open for commercial traffic, Angola Cables informed.

The SACS from Angola Cables was manufactured and powered by NEC Corporation and is one of the most advanced submarine telecommunications systems to go into commercial operation connecting Angola (Africa) and Brazil (South America).

Data transfer speeds will be greatly improved, reducing latency from Fortaleza (Brazil) to Luanda (Angola) from 350ms to 63ms, the company said. Luanda, will also connect to London and Miami with approximately 128 milliseconds latency.

Given the onward connections to the recently completed Monet Cable and the West Africa Cable System (WACS), SACS will also offer reduced latency between Miami (USA) and Cape Town (South Africa) from 338ms to 163ms.

António Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables said: “Our ambition is to transport South American and Asian data packets via our African hub using SACS, and together with Monet and the WACS, providing a more efficient direct connectivity option between North, Central and South America onto Africa, Europe and Asia. By developing and connecting ecosystems that allows for local IP traffic to be exchanged locally and regionally, the efficiency of networks that are serving the Southern Hemisphere can be vastly improved. As these developments progress, they will have considerable impact for the future growth and configuration of the global internet.” 

The cable will enable African internet service providers and users a more direct, secure path to the Americas – without having to pass through Europe. Content service providers in Latin America will also stand to benefit with the option of using the SACS route to reach markets in Africa and Europe without utilizing the traditional and high volume, Northern Hemisphere internet traffic routings, Angola Cables noted.

SACS is 100% owned and managed by Angola Cables has been designed with 100Gbps coherent WDM technology on an end-to-end solution. With 4 fiber pairs it offers a total design capacity of 40 Tbit/s between Fortaleza (Brazil) and Luanda (Angola).