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Angola-Brazil cable targets boosting SA internet

Johannesburg - Broadband in Africa could be in for a boost as plans to build another subsea cable, connecting Angola to Brazil, are underway.

The South Atlantic Cable System (Sacs), which will also be connected to North America via a separate network, is being spearheaded by cable company Angola Telecoms.

Angola Telecoms plans spending about $300m on the system, while the firm is tapping partners to help build its Brazil, North America route.

Landing points are set to include Angola’s Luanda, Brazil’s Fortaleza as well as São Paulo and Miami.

Sacs is set to be complete in 2018 and will boost capacity while also improving latency from 300ms to 135ms to Latin America. It will have a capacity of 40Tbit/s.

With a terrestrial fibre network from Africa’s East coast, the Middle East and Western Asia will also be offered an alternative to the current internet routes through Europe.

"If you today see the demand between Africa and South America, nobody wants to build a cable,” Angola Cables CEO António Nunes told Fin24.

“So, we decided to build the cable on our own, so that it's a sound investment.

"The SACS cable will be ready in 2018 and the American cable will be ready 2017,” Nunes explained.

The different route not only offers more capacity and better latency, but also a new diversity route in case other global networks go down.

Renewed subsea market?

The likes of  Seacom, EASSy and Wacs (West Africa Cable System) have been connected to Africa since 2009.

But there has been growing talk of more subsea broadband markets for Africa.

Earlier this year, Hong Kong ICT firm PCCW said it along with Telkom, MTN, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) and Telecom Egypt (TE) signed a memorandum of understanding to build Africa-1.

The Africa-1 broadband system is planned to stretch 12 000 km along Africa’s eastern coastline towards Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan and could go live next year.

Plans are further in place by the likes of MTN for the the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine cable, which has landing points in West Africa, to be connected to South Africa.







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