Angola Cables capitalises on location to link Brazil and Asia

ANGOLA’S planned undersea cable to South America would cut data transmission times between stock markets in Brazil and Hong Kong and open a new route between Africa and the US, the head of state-owned Angola Cables said.

France’s Alcatel-Lucent, Japan’s NEC, and TE Connectivity were bidding for an estimated $170 million (R1.76 billion) contract to lay the 6 000km cable between Angola and Brazil, Antonio Nunes, the chief executive of Angola Cables, said in an interview.

Construction would start early next year and would be completed in about 18 months, he said last week.

The cable, which will be able to carry almost as much data as west Africa’s existing link to Europe, would speed up South American telecommunications access to Asia by cutting out North America and Europe and running via Africa instead, he said.

After crossing the Atlantic, the route would initially run south to South Africa, then to Africa’s east coast and existing lines to Asia.

Angola wanted to further reduce transmission times by linking to networks with Zambia and Tanzania within two years to avoid having to send data to South Africa, Nunes said.

The cables are part of Angola’s plans to become a regional telecommunications hub and ease its dependence on oil.

“We’re in a good geographic location – quite lucky being between Nigeria and South Africa, and at the other end of the Brazil line,” Nunes said. “The point is we’re in the middle so we can distribute traffic.

“Africa will have the same number of internet users as the US by 2015 and demand, while less at first, will be enormous as Africans, the world’s youngest population, are raised on technology.”

Angola is already linked to the West African Cable System that connects South Africa to Portugal. It has a capacity of 5.12 terabytes per second compared with 4 terabytes per second on the line being built to Brazil.

Angola Cables, a group of the country’s telecommunications operators and 51 percent controlled by state-owned Angola Telecom, may be competing with three other projects that aim to link the two continents as the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics approaches, according to IHS Global Insight.

These include WASACE Cable, which plans to connect Nigeria and Brazil, while i3 Africa and Imphandze Investment Holdings of South Africa want to link Cape Town and Brazil as part of a new global network.

Johannesburg-based company eFive has signed deals with Alcatel-Lucent and TE Subcom, a division of TE Connectivity, to build a line from South Africa to Brazil, according to Kelvin Cottle, a spokesman for Alcatel based in Paris. Ros Thomas, the chief executive of eFive, said she could not answer questions because negotiations had not yet been concluded. – Bloomberg