Huawei Marine secures SAIL subsea cable contract

For a segment of the market that doesn’t yet actually exist, the South Atlantic subsea cable business seems to be quite popular. Yesterday Huawei Marine inked a deal with China Unicom and Camtel to build the South Atlantic Inter Link, or SAIL, which will be a cable between Africa and South America.

SAIL will connect the popular landing city of Fortaleza, Brazil with Cameroon, spanning some 6,000km. The plans call for four fiber pairs with an initial design capacity of 32Tbps.

Camtel and Cameroon are aiming to make the country an infrastructure hub for Africa, and have Chinese backing to help make it happen.

Readers may recall that a few months back, construction of SACS got underway in a rival project that will connect Fortaleza to Angola. That project has the Japanese giant NEC doing the heavy lifting for Angola Cables, and is expected to bring 40Tbps to bear.

Both projects are aimed at being complete next year sometime. If both come to fruition on schedule, that route will go from zero to 72Tbps in a matter of months, although I rather doubt the traffic itself will spike so quickly.