(Business in Cameroon) - Huawei Marine Networks, Chinese firm in charge of rolling out the fibre optic sub-marine cable between the towns of Kribi (Cameroon) and Fortaleza (Brazil), has just awarded the contract for the supply of this cable to the French company Nexans, present in the cable industry and ranked among the world leaders in the sector, we learned from reliable sources.

The amount of the contract was not revealed, but we were able to learn that this fibre optic sub-marine cable, with a length of 6,000 km, will be engineered and tested at the Rognan factory of Nexans in Norway. The delivery is scheduled for end of 2017. This sub-marine cable will then be rolled out until the last quarter of 2018 by Huawei Marine, a company to which the consortium gathering Cameroonian telecoms operator Camtel and company China Unicom, gave the works estimated at approximately FCfa 270 billion.

Christened “South Atlantic Inter Link”, this fibre optic cable will be the very first to link Africa to the American continent. It will become the 5^th sub-marine cable to which Cameroon will be connected.

This after SAT 3, rolled by the Cameroonian State; WACS, deployed by local subsidiary of MTN International; ACE, under deployment by Orange Cameroon; and NCNCS, deployed between Cameroon and Nigeria my the consortium Main One, as part of the development of a national broadband network by historical operator Camtel. The latter cable was also engineered by French Nexans.

Brice R. Mbodiam