Angola Cables, EllaLink team up to enhance South American data capacity

Angola Cables and EllaLink inked an agreement to boost data transfer and improve capacity between South America and Europe.

The companies are essentially creating an integrated route uniting the Monet cable system, of which Angola Cables is one of the owners and which connects South America to the US, and the EllaLink cable, the first direct route between South America and Europe, running from Fortaleza to Frankfurt on underwater and land routes.

The interconnection will take place in Fortaleza, Brazil, which is a landing point for both systems.

Data traffic on Monet will have lower latency to reach Europe by avoiding having to first go to the US and connect to Europe from there. EllaLink, meanwhile, will gain faster access to the US via Monet. 

The peering agreement does not involve exchanging fiber pairs in the respective systems. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“With this agreement we will add what we were missing to our IP portfolio: a direct link to Europe without having to go through either the United States or Africa,” Angola Cables CEO, Ângelo Gama, told journalists at the Capacity LatAm event in São Paulo.

“We challenge any other company in Brazil to provide faster connectivity between Brazil and Europe than us,” he added.

The companies estimate a data latency reduction of up to 51% on the route from São Paulo to Lisbon and 60% from Fortaleza to Lisbon, compared with current routes via US or Africa.

Latency reduction improves the transfer of financial data and real-time content delivery, as well as high-definition streaming content, ultimately providing a better customer experience.

With a transatlantic latency of less than 60ms, the EllaLink submarine cable offers low-latency and high-capacity connectivity between Latin America and Europe, connecting Sines, Lisbon, Madrid and Marseille in Europe, with Fortaleza, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

EXPANSIONS

Angola Cables expects its second datacenter in Fortaleza to go live next year. Construction is expected to start in the second half of 2024.

The company's first datacenter, Angonap, is already at full capacity.

The budget for the second site, however, has been reduced. Now, Angola Cables projects that it will invest US$40-50mn, down from the US$80mn initially estimated for the project, for what is expected to be a smaller facility. 

In total, the datacenter will have two halls with room for 200 racks each.

The company is also reassessing part of the project amid the new demands around cloud and artificial intelligence, especially regarding the power consumption related to the GPUs' semiconductors.

These AI processors cause racks to consume up to 18KW per unit, compared with around 3.5KW per rack in traditional CPUs, he said.

“We're redoing all the design we did for our datacenter to scale,” the executive said, adding that around 70% of datacenter costs are for power and the remainder for infrastructure. 

The firm's plans include the use of renewable energy sources, liquid cooling technologies and even green hydrogen.

For now, the new datacenter is set to have projected capacity of 16MW, to be delivered gradually depending on future customer demand.

The company is in final talks to sign agreements with anchor-clients for the site, Gama said.

An important challenge for Angola Cables, as well as for other local players, is to expand the scope of potential customers in Fortaleza. 

Gama explicitly says that it is necessary to create ways to attract large corporates, OTT and content companies to set up shop in Fortaleza, including via government programs and state initiatives. That is, making sure the city is not just used for pass-through of data and content, but as a local hub, but that is no simple matter. 

Although it is considerably closer to Europe, Africa and the US than major hubs São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, facilitating international data traffic, and land prices are much cheaper, the city is still a small consumer market.