South Atlantic Cable Systems Reports Traffic Surge

Following the rise in traffic experienced by the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS), major telco players look for direct access to markets in the US and South America.

When the 6 156 km intercontinental subsea cable came on stream in September 2018, latency between Africa and the Americas was almost halved, opening an express digital connection to accelerate digital and economic growth on either side of the Atlantic. Since that time traffic on the system has increased tenfold providing major telecoms, content delivery networks, and multi-nationals with faster access to Latin America – and the US and Europe via the Monet Cable connection.

Chief Executive Officer of Angola Cables, Angelo Gama said that that private line connections to the US and Latin America from the African continent have seen significant growth. In addition, the low latency between the Americas and Africa has enabled operators in Africa to optimise their global network solutions via the robust resilience of the SACS subsea cable system.

“On the other hand, from Americas to Africa, we are seeing a sharp demand from hyperscalers and content providers looking to utilise the low-latency routings of SACS to transit and cache data closer to the edge or base of their trans-Atlantic customers.” Liquid Intelligent Technologies recently opened a Point of Presence (PoP) in Miami, using the low latency connection of SACS. The POP connects to their 100,000km fibre network across 11 countries on the continent and another 14 countries via the Operators Alliance Programme and Liquid Satellite Services.

David Eurin, Chief Executive Officer, Liquid Sea, said: “Via SACS we are able to guarantee a secure, high-speed interconnection to all our partners and customers in the USA and give our customers in Africa direct access to internet and data centre resources in the US.”

Eurin added that the Miami POP enables US-based operators, businesses, OTT, Cloud service providers, and CDN operators to access 40 data centres across Africa, including nine data centres operated by Africa Data Centres and the six operated by Teraco.

Vodacom also upgraded their connection on the SACS cable to extend services and solutions for clients into Brazil and Chile. Guy Clarke, Managing Director for Vodacom Business International said, “this important upgrade gives us the option to expand our services in South America, whilst also providing a direct link between South Africa and Miami in the US.”

Gama notes, “the secure and efficient low latency of our network and the expanded connectivity options through our data centers of AngoNAP Luanda, and AngoNAP Fortaleza in Brazil gives operators and service providers a choice of flexible routing or redundancy options when managing their individual or customised network requirements.”