The South Atlantic Inter Link (SAIL) cable will run 6,000km from Kribi in Cameroon with Fortaleza, the Brazilian town that is becoming a hub for subsea cables. SAIL, with four fibre pairs, will have a design capacity of 32Tbits/s, using 100G technology.
David Nkote, general manager of state-owned Camtel, said: “When it completed, it will provide new international connectivity, to facilitate bandwidth demand between Africa and South America and support the booming economies in the two continents.”
Huawei’s rotating CEO Guo Ping and Lu Yimin, the CEO of China Unicom, took part on the signing ceremony in Shanghai with Nkote.
Lu said: “China has strategic partnerships with Africa and South America. SAIL not only provides high-quality international telecommunication services to countries in these two continents, but also better serves Chinese companies to develop their business in these regions.”
SAIL is due for service in late 2018. Fortaleza is also a landing point of the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS), which starts in Angola in south-western Africa, for Brusa, which runs to Virginia Beach in the US, and for Seabras-1, which runs to New York from São Paulo, Brazil.
