NEC begins construction of South Atlantic Cable System

Wholesale telecom services provider Angola Cables S.A. and contractor NEC Corp. say that construction has begun on the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS). The undersea cable network will be the first to connect Africa and South America in the southern hemisphere.

The more than 6,200-km submarine network connect Luanda, Angola, and Fortaleza, Brazil, with onward submarine cable connectivity to Miami. The partners expects SACS to come online in the middle of 2018.

Construction of the network is expected to cost $160 million. The Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. (SMBC), with the support of Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI) through the Banco de Desenvolvimento de Angola (BDA), are expected to foot most of the bill.

SACS will be designed to take advantage of a control plane based on software-defined networking (SDN) technology. The submarine fiber-optic network will have an initial design capacity of 40 Tbps, broken up into 100 wavelengths of 100 Gbps in each of four fiber pairs.

"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 center to data center connectivity across the Atlantic."

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