Work Begins on SACS’s African End

August 10th, 2017 by · 1 Comment

The project to connect the continents of Africa and South America via a subsea fiber cable has officially been launched.  Yesterday Angola Cables kicked off construction of one of the key infrastructure pieces of SACS.

They are currently installing the cable on the shore of Angola, which hopes to further its goal of becoming a bandwidth hub for all of southern Africa.  The idea is to cut 80% off of the current latency between Angola and Brazil, which currently takes a 300ms route up to Europe, across the North Atlantic, and back south.  Just how much traffic takes this route is unclear, but whatever that bandwidth is certainly does so very inefficiently.

When complete, SACS will offer up to 40Tbps on the 6500km route between Quissama, Angola and Fortaleza, Brazil, where it will be able to further connect to cable systems there stretching up to North America.  Of course, there’s a lot of cable yet to be laid on this project.  Completion is targeted in 2018.

If you haven't already, please take our Reader Survey! Just 3 questions to help us better understand who is reading Telecom Ramblings so we can serve you better!

Categories: Undersea cables

Join the Discussion!

1 Comment, Add Yours!


  • mhammett says:

    Whatever traffic does follow those routes that moves to the new cables frees up capacity on the existing routes. How much that is, sure, no idea.

    One would expect whatever it is would grow, given the increase in performance they’ll have.

Leave a Comment

You may Log In to post a comment, or fill in the form to post anonymously.





  • Ramblings’ Jobs

    Post a Job - Just $99/30days
  • Event Calendar