Huawei Marine Sets Sail to Build SAIL

The laying of the SAIL cable system across the south Atlantic ocean is apparently underway late last week. A ship from Huawei Marine has set sale for the job, which will take a couple months.

SAIL is one of at least two cables under construction between South America and Africa. Backed by Cameroon’s Camtel and China Unicom, SAIL will connect the popular Brazilian landing spot in Fortaleza with Cameroon’s Kribi Deep Sea Port. The 6,000km cable is designed for 32Tbps and of course leverages 100G technology to get there.  Much of the funding comes from the Export-Import Bank of China.

The rival SACS cable, being built by NEC and backed by Angola Cables, landed in Brazil earlier this year and is expected to come online next quarter. With both cables in service, there will suddenly be 72Tbps of capacity on a route previously untraversed. When combined with the new Monet cable, traffic from Africa will suddenly have a completely new route to the US.

Now, if one were to somehow build a terrestrial link directly across Africa to Djibouti, I wonder what the latency would look like on a US-India route that avoids both the Suez and Singapore choke points entirely…

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Categories: Undersea cables