Angola Cables-owned South Atlantic Cable System (SACS), linking Africa and the Americas is now live and expected to lower latency and provide a more direct routing for internet traffic in the Southern Hemisphere, according to the firm.

Connecting Angola (Africa) and Brazil (South America), SACS aims to increase data transfer speeds by five times faster than existing cable routings, reducing latency from Fortaleza (Brazil) to Luanda (Angola) from 350ms to 63ms. SACS is expected to contribute to reductions in data traffic costs between South America and Africa, offering savings to operators that in turn, could be passed onto end-users and customers.

António Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables said, “Our ambition is to transport South American and Asian data packets via our African hub using SACS, and together with Monet and the WACS, provide 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.”

The cable will enable African internet service providers and users a more direct, secure path to the Americas – without having to pass through Europe. Content service providers in Latin America will also stand to benefit with the option of using the SACS route to reach markets in Africa and Europe without utilizing the traditional and high volume, Northern Hemisphere internet traffic routings.

SACS is 100% owned and managed by Angola Cables has been designed with 100Gbps coherent WDM technology on an end-to-end solution. With 4 fiber pairs it offers a total design capacity of 40 Tbit/s between Fortaleza (Brazil) and Luanda (Angola).