A new subsea broadband cable project, led by Angola, is set to provide a flood of international internet bandwidth to countries on the west coast of Africa, including South Africa, when it goes live in mid-2018. The South Atlantic Cable System, coupled with the Monet cable - which is already under construction and will link São Paulo in Brazil with Miami in the US next year - promises a faster and lower latency (round-trip time) internet route to Latin America and the US.Its backers hope it will transform Angola's economy, helping it lessen its dependence on oil revenue, and help grow the digital economy in the region.Angola's five largest telecommunications operators - Angola Telecom, Unitel, MSTelcom, Movicel and Startel - are investors in Angola Cables, the company that is responsible for building the South Atlantic Cable System.The contract for the cable's construction has been awarded to NEC of Japan, which is already conducting a marine survey to determine the best route along the ocean floor.story_article_left1The total cost of the project - including Monet, in which Angola Cables is a consortium investor alongside Google and others, and a new data centre in Fortaleza in northeastern Brazil - is about $300-million (R4.2-billion).The 6,500km cable will connect Luanda with Fortaleza, with a design capacity of 40Tbit/s, making it the highest-capacity cable to connect Africa to date. It will interconnect in Luanda with the existing West Africa Cable System, which links South Africa and a host of other African nations to the UK.Angola Cables CEO António Nunes said this week that the new route will cut latency between South Africa and the US in half. Currently, traffic between the countries is routed through Europe and across cables in the North Atlantic. Lower latencies are important for applications such as real-time stock trading and video gaming.Nunes said the investment in the South Atlantic Cable System and Monet is a crucial component of Angola's plan to wean itself off its heavy reliance on oil revenues. The collapse in the oil price in the past 18 months has hit Angola and other oil-producing nations, including Nigeria, hard. Angola has identified digital infrastructure and services as key to this plan.Nunes said he believed the new cable would have an impact far beyond Angola. South African telecoms operators, internet service providers and universities are expected to use the cable system to secure fast, low-latency access to the US, home to the world's largest base of digital content ...