Multinational telco Angola Cables has announced the opening of its carrier neutral datacentre, AngoNAP Fortaleza in Fortaleza, Brazil.

The Tier III designed datacentre will cater for the growing demand in content and data transmission in the Southern hemisphere.

According to a statement issued by the company, the interconnection point will enable African entities to develop and expand their businesses in Brazil, Latin America and the USA via the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) and Monet subsea cables.

The datacentre will accommodate other submarine international cables systems, backhaul providers, content providers, CDNs including research and academic internet exchange points in Latin America, the company stated.

António Nunes, Angola Cables CEO, said, "The AngoNAP Fortaleza facility has far reaching advantages and benefits for CDNs, IXPs, OTTs as well as national and international telecom operators, and content providers seeking to extend and expand their global reach and product offerings between the Americas and Africa."

Nunes added that the datacentre has been specifically designed to receive more submarine cables landing in Fortaleza and will provide multiple connection services for any operators or businesses requiring high capacity data services.

"From an Angola Cables viewpoint, our investment in the AngoNAP Fortaleza is important in advancing and expanding our business horizons. This is the first point of neutral connectivity in the Technological Park of Praia do Futuro (Beach of the Future) in Fortaleza, Brazil," the company stated.

"Other cable systems and customers will have the option to host their data or content via cloud services or in the datacentre directly - with the opportunity to promote their businesses to world markets via our ultra-low latency SACS connection," Nunes said. "This has many advantages not only in meeting the rising demand for media rich content in the global digital economy, but will improve links for trade, commerce, inter-government co-operation and academic learning on either side of the Atlantic and beyond."

Owned and operated by Angola Cables, the datacentre currently occupies an area of 2 100m2 (Phase One), with a total area of 9 000m2 available for future expansion. The facility has an energy redundancy capacity of 12.5 MVA and currently has 1 000 scalable racks offering customers a 99.98% service availability standard.

Construction of the data centre commenced in early 2017.

In February 2019 the company confirmed the Tier IIII certification and that AngoNAP Fortaleza would accommodate Monet, the international subsea telecommunication cable system which connects Boca Raton in Florida in the USA to Fortaleza and Santos in Brazil.

Nunes encouraged companies in Africa to host content locally and reduce the cost of connectivity for ISPs.

"Hosting data outside of a particular country is a low cost process. As many of the larger content providers are hosting a lot of content they are able to realise synergies, in terms of the costs of hosting and content provision," he said.