The South Atlantic Cable System goes live

26 September 2018 | Natalie Bannerman

Angola Cable’s South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) linking Angola to Brazil is now live and open for commercial traffic.

The 6,165 km, 40Tbps cable is the first and fastest link between Africa and the Americas with the lowest latency to date. The system itself was built by NEC Corportation and offers data transfer speeds of 63ms from Fortaleza (Brazil) to Luanda (Angola), as well as Luanda, to London and Miami with approximately 128 milliseconds latency. 

In addition to reduced latency, the new cable will also contribute to the reduction in data traffic costs between South America and Africa. António Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables has described the cable as “more than just a game-changer” when it comes to data connectivity and services between the two continents.

“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,” added Nunes.

As a result of the new system, Angola will be positioned as strategic hub to serve the transatlantic region with low latency and resilient connections. In addition because of its onwards connections to 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.

The company says that the new system will give African internet service providers and end users a more direct and secure path to the Americas, bypassing Europe. While Latin American content service providers can access the African market without having to use traditional internet traffic routes in the northern hemisphere.