Angola Cables upgrades its Atlantic cables with Ciena

Angola Cables is upgrading the optical equipment on the cables that give Angola a direct route to the United States via Brazil: SACS, between Angola and Brazil, and MONET, between Brazil and the United States.

The Angolan wholesale operator and its supplier, US network equipment maker Ciena, said on 29 September 2026 that Angola Cables would deploy Ciena’s Waveserver platform with WaveLogic 6 Extreme optics, its 6500 Reconfigurable Line System and its Navigator Network Control Suite software across both systems, including 800G client interfaces on MONET. Neither company disclosed a contract value or a completion date.

The route

MONET runs 10,556 km between the United States and Brazil. SACS, which the companies describe as the first South Atlantic crossing, runs 6,165 km from Brazil to Angola. Combined, they carry data between Angola and the United States in 130 milliseconds round trip, according to the announcement.

In May 2026, Angola Cables linked both systems to Uniti’s US fibre network, extending the route into more than 300 US metro markets.

“Our submarine cable systems are a critical digital bridge connecting Africa with the Americas, offering a diverse and secure route between these continents, while demand from hyperscalers and cloud providers continues to accelerate,” said Adriano Caldevilla, chief technology officer of Angola Cables.

More from the same fibre

The upgrade works on the existing cables rather than adding new ones. Ciena says the equipment lets Angola Cables sell capacity in sizes from a single 100 Gbps service up to a full fibre pair, including spectrum and managed optical fibre networks, to hyperscale, cloud, wholesale, content and enterprise customers.

It extends a long relationship. Angola Cables selected Ciena for MONET in 2017 and upgraded the cable’s capacity with it in 2021. It is also the second WaveLogic 6 Extreme deal on an Africa-facing cable that Ciena has announced in 9 days: on 21 September, the ACE consortium chose the same optics to lift its Europe-to-South Africa link past 30 Tb/s.