Huawei Sets Sail for the South Atlantic

Huawei Marine said this morning that it has been selected to do the construction for another transatlantic cable.  Unlike Hibernia Express and AE Connect, this one is much further south.  If complete, the Cameroon-Brazil Cable System will connect South America and Africa.

CBCS would be 6,000km long, consist of 4 fibre pairs, and have an initial theoretical capacity of 32Tbps.  Huawei gear, including its titanium 6fp submarine Repeater 1660, would power the 100G wavelengths.

Currently, traffic between the two continents must transit between both Europe and North America, or even further across both the Indian and Pacific oceans.  Clearly from a network standpoint, this gap must eventually be closed.

We’ve seen a series of similar proposed cables in the South Atlantic, each of which takes off from Fortaleza in the west and lands at a different spot along the African coast: SAex.  As in the North Atlantic (or perhaps even more so), the idea and even the execution are much easier than the funding.

The protagonists in this case are CamTel and China Unicom, which have already invested in the project.  Telefonica is also supporting the effort, although precisely how is unclear from the release — probably as an anchor customer.  They hope to have the cable built by the end of 2017.

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Categories: Undersea cables