Angola Cables to invest in new points-of-presence in Brazil

Wholesale connectivity provider Angola Cables intends to diversify the number of points-of-presence (PoP) in Brazil due to increased demand from internet service providers and over-the-top players, Victor Costa (pictured), the company's regional director (pictured), told BNamericas.

A PoP is a physical interface at which two or more networks or communication devices share a connection. They are mostly used to allow users to connect to the internet with an internet service provider.

Angola Cables currently operates three points-of-presence in Brazil: in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza. 

The objective, according to the executive, is to have new PoPs better serving customers located in different parts of the country, further reducing the latency of services. 

The terrestrial interconnection of the PoPs is made mostly through the leasing of fiber networks from third parties.

CABLES

The company operates the Monet cable, which connects São Paulo, Fortaleza and Rio de Janeiro to Miami, and SACS (South Atlantic Cable System), which connects Brazil to Angola.

Monet is a JV with Google, Brazil’s Algar Telecom and Uruguay’s Antel.

By connecting to the WACS cable, off the coast of Africa, the Monet/SACS network also offers connectivity, albeit indirectly, to Europe. Through partnerships, the company's systems also reach Asia.

“Our goal is to go beyond Brazil and Africa and become a global tier 1 player. And that is what we’re working for,” Costa said.

According to the executive, in the last six months, traffic on Monet grew more than 100% due to the growth of cloud services and the consumption of streaming and social networks during the pandemic.

To cope with the increased demand, Angola Cables expanded its partnership with Ciena and added 2.2Tbps of capacity to the cable, to enhance the performance of bandwidth-intensive cloud-based services on the Brazil-US route.

Angola Cables has operated since 2019 the AngoNap Tier III datacenter in Fortaleza, which hosts corporates, telcos and ISPs seeking to deliver and reach content internationally. The datacenter is a landing point for both Monet and SACS.

The project began in 2017 and cost 100mn reais (currently US$19.1mn).

AngoNap also provides services to Brazil's Grupo Globo, Netflix, Facebook, Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure.  

“The cloud has grown a lot. We have two datacenters [in Brazil and AngoNap Angola] and we’re a company that has enjoyed our datacenters very well. But they’re not our core business, they are a lever for our core, which is the international connection," Costa said.

Together, Angola Cables' three main systems total 31,251km, with 17 points of presence and 16 landing stations.