TM GLOBAL, the global and wholesale arm of Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) and Angola Cables have been exploring another alternative via a new express route connecting the southern hemisphere subsea cables from Asia directly to South America.

A Proof of Concept (PoC) testing is being conducted by both parties leveraging two cable systems; the South Africa Far East cable system (SAFE), connecting Malaysia to Angola, and South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) connecting Angola to Brazil owned by both parties respectively.

According to a statement issued by the companies, most of the global internet traffic today utilises infrastructure located primarily in the northern hemisphere to link Asia, Europe and North America. Meanwhile, the southern hemisphere, which includes parts of Asia, Africa and South America is heavily connected via links coming from the North as well. However, the traffic to the southern region currently travels a longer route which may affect the internet experience of the end users.

The partners say based on preliminary PoC results, there is a reduction in the latency reading as compared to the current northern hemisphere routes.

This may lead to a significant improvement in the global internet traffic routing quality especially on data connectivity services to the southern hemisphere, they claim.

"The new express route is set to provide a shorter path connecting Asia to South America while bypassing Middle East and Europe, hence delivering a better customer experience. The low latency routing will also provide the catalyst for the creation of more effective digital ecosystems that are developing within the southern hemisphere. This initiative is expected to transform data transfer between countries and economies, enabling more robust connection amongst backhaul providers, content/application providers and content delivery network providers in a more efficient data sharing process. The benefits will be far-reaching, especially for financial institutions in conveying market-sensitive information or multinational companies in sharing large amounts of data and applications to users in the US, Latin America or the Far East region," reads the statement.

TM GLOBAL and Angola Cables believe that this initiative will provide better options for service providers in growing their business and expanding their reachability to new and niche markets.

In July 2019 Angola Cables launched a single platform 'Cloud as a Service' to the African market, available via the AngoNAP datacentres in Luanda and AngoNAP Fortaleza Tier III in Brazil with direct linkages to the low latency SACS and Monet cable systems "within scaleable, secure, co-location environments."