Cable type Fibre-optic Construction beginning Q1 2014 Design capacity 40 Tb/s | Fate Planned Construction finished 2016 | |
First traffic H2 2016 (ready for service) | ||
The South Atlantic Cable System or SACS (Portuguese: Sistema de Cabo do Atlântico Sul), also known as the Angola-Brazil Cable, is a planned submarine communications cable in the South Atlantic Ocean linking Luanda, Angola with Fortaleza, Brazil with a leg connecting the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha as well. It is designed to provide low latency routing between Africa and Asia in the east and the Americas in the west. Data traffic between Angola and Brazil will no longer have to pass through Europe and the US, as currently occurs.
It is expected that the SACS will cut data traffic costs between South America, Africa and onwards to Asia by 80%. In Fortaleza the SACS will be interconnected to Seabras-1 while the Angolan end will provide onward connectivity by the SAT-3/WASC cable. According to its initiators it will have a lot of demand, mainly because it will be the first undersea cable in the South Atlantic linking the African continent to Latin America. The only other planned cable to potentially compete with SACS is the South Atlantic Express cable planned to enter service in 2017.
The cable will measure 6,165 km in length and will contain four fibre pairs, each capable of transmitting 100 wavelengths with a bandwidth of 100Gbit/s. Construction costs are expected to amount to $278 million, funded by Angola Cables, a consortium of major Angolan telecoms companies (Angola Telecom with 51% of the capital, Unitel with 31%, MSTelcom with 9%, Movicel with 6%, and Startel with 3%). In January 2014 it was announced that construction of the cable would start already in the first quarter 2014 and would be completed within 18 months, earlier than originally anticipated. Although Brazilian Telebras announced in December 2011 that they would jointly launch the undersea cable with Angola Cables, in media reports from February 2014 Telebras made clear that they had only made "the offer of a landing point on Brazilian soil" and would not participate in the joint venture.
In October 2014 Antonio Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables, said to journalists that SACS deployment would start "in around a month" (November 2014), while confirming that investment in construction would be handled by Angola Cables alone after Brazilian telco Telebras dropped out. On 21 October 2014 an order of the Angolan president announced that the government would guarantee to Angolan banks who have approved a $260 million bank loans earmarked for building the SACS.