The first cable to cross the southern Atlantic ocean took another step forward this week. Angola Cables has has signed a contract with Japan’s NEC Corporation to build the cable system, which promises to link Africa and South America directly for the first time.
The South Atlantic Cable System will hook up the Angolan port city of Sangano with Fortaleza over in Brazil. The initial design calls for 4 fiber pairs at 100x100Gbps, or 40Tbps of total capacity, which is an awful lot of capacity to start off with between Latin America and Africa.
Fortaleza of course has landing stations that serve a variety of cable systems, and in this case will serve well as a jumping off point for North America. Angola Cables recently joined with Google for a new cable system on that route as well.
Construction of SACS is slated to start by the end of the year, with a ready-for-service date at the end of 2016. Looks like it might really happen this time, it’s been talked about for a few years now.
Another proposed system in the region, SAEx as proposed by eFive, has also been mentioned during that time, although it’s been a while since we’ve had an update on that one.