Puneet Varma (Editor)

SAIL (cable system)

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Design capacity
  
32 Tb/s

SAIL (cable system)

Date of first use
  
Q4 2017 (ready for service)

The South Atlantic Inter Link (SAIL) (formerly referred to as Cameroon-Brazil Cable System or CBCS) is a planned submarine communications cable in the South Atlantic Ocean linking Kribi, Cameroon with Fortaleza, Brazil. The project is led by China Unicom, Camtel and Huawei Marine Networks and designed to provide low latency routing between Africa and Asia in the east and the Americas in the west. At present international traffic from Africa to America is routed via Western Europe first before going to America. SAIL will provide a direct route from Africa to America, providing Cameroon, Brazil and their neighboring countries with improved performance.

The cable will measure approximately 6,000 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 $130 million (80 billion CFA), $81 million (50 billion CFA) of which are to be funded by Exim Bank of China with the remainder being contributed by Camtel. Camtel on its part has received funding worth $17 million (20 billion CFA) from Unicom.

On October 22nd, 2015 Huawei Marine announced that it has been awarded with the contract to construct the SAIL cable starting in early 2016.

SAIL will be the fourth submarine cable to land in Cameroon after WACS, ACE and SAT-3/WASC which will provide diversified onwards connectivity to countries along the West Coast of Africa and to Europe.

References

SAIL (cable system) Wikipedia