NEC in World’s First South Atlantic Submarine Cable Link

Angola Cables S.A. has signed a contract to build the world’s first submarine cable system across the South Atlantic with NEC Corporation as the system supplier.

The South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) will connect Angola and Brazil, directly linking the African continent to Latin America for the first time, to enable high speed and high capacity international data transmissions, spurring trade and economic growth.

In order to meet growing demand from broadband, mobile, broadcasting and enterprise traffic crossing the South Atlantic, 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).

The cable system will land at Sangano cable landing station in Angola, near the capital city of Luanda, and in a datacenter in Fortaleza, Brazil, which, will be built for the cable systems that are under construction by Angola Cables. The Operator recently announced the construction of another cable system, COTA (Cable Of The Americas) connecting Santos and Fortaleza in Brazil to Miami in the USA. This way Angola Cables will connect Angola and Africa directly to Brazil and the USA through SACS and COTA, adding to today’s existing connectivity from Africa to Europe through the existing WACS (West Africa Cable System).

The total amount of investment for SACS is estimated to be approximately USD $160 million.

“Angola Cables’ mission is to transform Angola into one of the major telecommunication hubs in Africa. This new submarine cable, together with our other projects, will help to improve connectivity between Angola and Africa to Latin and North America. We will continue to develop our Internet highways to enable our telecoms, ISP and enterprise customers to differentiate themselves in today’s competitive and highly-evolving African marketplace,” said António Nunes, Chief Executive Officer of Angola Cables.

“NEC Corporation is proud to be the system supplier for SACS, a unique cable system that directly links Angola to Brazil and the rest of the world,” said Naoki Yoshida, General Manager at NEC’s Submarine Network Division. “With Africa and South America growing in importance as strategic regions for NEC, being selected as the SACS system supplier gives us a valuable advantage. As one of the world’s top vendors of submarine cable systems, with more than 40 years of experience constructing over 200,000 kilometers of cable systems, NEC is committed to the successful completion of SACS and to building on our relationship with Angola Cables.”

Construction of SACS is expected to begin before the end of the year. The system is targeted to be ready-for-service during the fourth quarter of 2016. The cable will enable Africa to take advantage of close cultural and business ties with Brazil. It will also improve onward connectivity to the financial markets in South and North America.

Press Release