The South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) has reported a tenfold increase in traffic since September 2018, when the 6 156 km intercontinental subsea cable went live, nearly halving latency between Africa and the Americas and opening an express digital connection to accelerate digital and economic growth on either side of the Atlantic.

The system provides telecommunications operators, content delivery networks and multinationals faster access to Latin America, as well as the US and Europe through the Monet Cable connection.

“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 through the robust resilience of the SACS subsea cable system,” says Angola Cables CEO Angelo Gama.

“On the other hand, from the Americas to Africa, we are seeing a sharp demand from hyperscalers and content providers looking to use the low-latency routings of SACS to transit and cache data closer to the edge or base of their trans-Atlantic customers.”

Using the low latency connection of SACS, Liquid Intelligent Technologies recently opened a point of presence (PoP) in Miami, conecting to its 100 000 km fibre network across 11 countries on the continent and another 14 countries through the Operators Alliance Programme and Liquid Satellite Services.

“Through SACS, we are able to guarantee a secure, high-speed interconnection to all our partners and customers in the US and give our customers in Africa direct access to Internet and data centre resources in the US,” says Liquid Sea CEO David Eurin.

The Miami PoP enables US- based operators, businesses, over-the-top service providers, cloud service providers and content delivery network operators to access 40 data centres across Africa, including nine data centres operated by Africa Data Centres and six operated by Teraco.

Vodacom also upgraded its connection on the SACS cable to extend services and solutions for clients into Brazil and Chile.

“This important upgrade gives us the option to expand our services in South America, while also providing a direct link between South Africa and Miami,” says Vodacom Business International MD Guy Clarke.

“The secure and efficient low latency of our network and the expanded connectivity options through our data centres of AngoNAP Luanda and AngoNAP Fortaleza in Brazil gives operators and service providers a choice of flexible routing or redundancy options.”