Africa-Press – Angola. The Chairman of the Board of Directors of the telecom firm UNITEL, Aguinaldo Jaime, announced on Saturday (13) that the company has invested 43 million US dollars in the branch of the submarine cable called 2Africa, with approximately 45,000 kilometers of fiber optics.
The announcement was made at the inauguration of the new Landing Station of the 2Africa Submarine Cable, located in the municipality of Cacuaco, in the presence of the Minister of Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Media, Mário Oliveira.
The new fiber optic cable, which will connect 33 countries, extending beyond Africa to Asia and Europe, as the largest on the continent, represents much more than the activation of a new technological infrastructure, but a vision and ambition of commitment to the future.
According to Aguinaldo Jaime, the submarine cable also represents the conviction that connectivity is a fundamental catalyst for the social and economic development of countries, being one of the most relevant digital infrastructure projects of the last decade worldwide.
“This is a new generation submarine cable, approximately 45,000 kilometers long and with 33 anchor points, interconnecting Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, with a projected capacity of over 180 Terabits per second. This system brings together in a single structure more capacity than all the cables currently in operation in Africa, a true global backbone of connectivity,” the manager explained.
For Angola, he continued, 23.6 Terabits per second were allocated, a capacity that will allow the country to meet the technological needs of the next decade with greater security ad modernity.
Currently, he said, Angola is connected to this global network through the operator UNITEL, the only Angolan operator participating in the international consortium that brings together some of the most prestigious names in the telecommunications sector, such as Vodafone, WIOCC, China Mobile International, MTN, Orange, Telecom Egypt, STC and Meta.
He added that UNITEL was responsible for developing the connecting branch in Angola, building the anchoring point in Cacuaco, and implementing this CLS cable landing station.
In his view, the investment constitutes a direct contribution to strengthening digital sovereignty and modernizing critical infrastructure for technological inclusion, priorities assumed by the Angolan Executive in the 2023-2027 period and aligned with Angola 2050.
In his vision, he continued, it was a structural leap in its digital transformation, with a significant increase in international broadband capacity, guaranteeing greater speed, greater stability for fixed and mobile services, greater resilience and redundancy of telecommunications, reinforcing operational security for the State, for companies and for families.
It will also Create conditions for the establishment of Data Centers and other advanced data processing infrastructures, accelerating digitization in sectors such as education, health, financial services, among others.
In turn, UNITEL’s Technical Manager, Júlio Gonçalves, guaranteed that with this investment it will be possible to have a more resilient internet, immune to outages, avoiding situations that have already happened in the past and actually allowing Angolans to have better and faster access.
In a first phase, according to the manager, it will allow interconnection prices worldwide, Angola’s interconnection to the world, to actually decrease and subsequently, in a 2nd phase, the means will be reflected in the prices to final customers.
The national fiber optic network, currently 14,000 kilometers long, allows for presence in all provincial capitals, also possessing metropolitan networks within large cities, thus allowing the internet to reach the most remote places in the country.
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