TE and 4iG to Construct New Subsea Cable

Angola based state-owned telecom telecommunication company, iAngola Cables is ready to deploy a 260 million US dollars-worth submarine fiber optic cable linking Angola and Brazil, the South Atlantic Cable System in an effort to provide high-speed data connections connecting two continents.

The optical fiber cable will be 6,000 kilometers long and will link the capital Luanda (Angola) to Fortaleza (Brazil). The cable link is expected to be operational in 2015 and is designed to have a data transmission capacity of 40 Tbps (terabits per second).

The bank guarantee, from two Angolan banks, was granted to state-owned company iAngola Cables and is intended to lay an undersea telecommunications cable between Angola and Brazil, called the South Atlantic Cable System, and another between Brazil and the United States, called the Americas Cable.

An optical fiber cable containing one or more optical fibers are used as telecommunication cable to carry information at the speed of light utilizing the total internal reflection of optical signals when injected into optical fibers. Optical fibers are coated with acrylate coating layers and are secured in protective tubes and further protected using sheathing and armoring materials suitable for the environment before deploying in terrestrial and submarine fields.

In Angola, access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) has improved dramatically since the end of the Angolan Civil War in 2002 that ravaged the country from its start in 1975. In 2001, the Angola government began adopting regulations to liberalize the telecom industry, which enabled private investments to revitalize the country’s ICT infrastructure that had been severely damaged by the decades-long conflict. Today, Angola has one of the largest mobile telecom markets in sub-Saharan Africa and internet access is growing steadily.

By connecting Latin America to Angola, the country could be a hub for telecommunication services between Latin American and Asian countries. Fiber optic networks have the potential to change the economy of a country by directly visible outputs and invisible outputs.