Telecoms wholesale operator Angola Cables S.A. and IT system supplier NEC Corporation have announced that the contract to build the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) has come into force as of 6 April 2016.

SACS is the first subsea fiber optic cable system to connect Africa and South America in the southern hemisphere. The cost of the project cost is expected to reach $160 million and will be partially co-funded by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) with the support of Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI) through the Banco de Desenvolvimento de Angola (BDA).

NEC and Angola Cables S.A. also indicted that they expect to complete their work on SACS by the middle of 2018.

"SACS will connect Luanda, Angola and Fortaleza, Brazil, directly linking the African continent to Latin America for the first time, spanning more than 6,200 km across the South Atlantic, enabling high speed and large capacity international data transmissions. From Fortaleza, SACS can be connected to another cable system which stretches to Miami Florida, enabling Angola and Africa to connect directly with the USA," according to an announcement.

Antonio Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables says the overarching goal of the SACS is to enhance communication. "Our main objective is to improve the quality of communications between Africa and the Americas, creating a totally new route in the south hemisphere, providing term and peak capacity product offerings and support for the region's expanding data requirements of today and for tomorrow,"

Nunes adds that SACS will be constructed using state-of-the-art technology, with 100G-coherent design for low latency, reliable delivery for demanding bandwidth needs and direct datacenter to datacenter connectivity across the Atlantic.

The SACS will feature a control plane based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology to serve bandwidth-intensive applications as well as an initial design capacity of 40Tbps (100Gbps x 100 wavelengths x 4 fiber pairs).

Toru Kawauchi, General Manager at NEC's Submarine Network Division, says, "The South Atlantic Cable System is a unique cable system that will directly link Angola to Brazil and the rest of the world, and NEC Corporation prides itself to be the system supplier and would like to thank Angola Cables for giving NEC the chance to be part of this epoch-making cable. We would also like to extend our gratitude to JBIC, SMBC and NEXI, for providing the much needed financial support, without them SACS would not have been realised. "