Ângelo Gama has more than 21 years of experience within the global IT and telecoms industry. As CEO of Angola Cables, Gama’s responsibilities include the management of all structuring projects and the development and implementation of the company’s technological innovation strategy. Prior to joining Angola Cables, Gama was General Manager of Net One, one of the first wireless Internet providers in Angola. Previously he served as Business Development Director for MS Telcom, Angola’s second largest fixed telecommunications operator with the largest national backbone of satellite stations.
What is the significance of Atlantic Convergence 2024 to you?
I think a lot of the world still thinks about “transatlantic” in the sense of connecting Europe to North America. For us at Angola Cables, our focus is on another version of that: connecting Africa and South America. When Angola Cables began, we were only dealing with north-to-south connections from Europe to Africa, but we then moved on to east-to-west connections. This event is a great step in encouraging our industry to see “transatlantic” as more of a “Pan-Atlantic” mindset and consider how all continents in the region can interconnect and work together in a collaborative way. That collaborative mindset fosters new partnerships and innovation.
How does Angola Cables fit into the overall inter-connection ecosystem model, which encompasses the convergence of subsea and terrestrial fiber, subsea cables, neutral IX, and data centers?
Through our efforts to build more east-to-west connections across the Southern Hemisphere, we have realized the first fully completed transmission link ring connecting the hemispheres through the Atlantic. We’ve had the opportunity to work closely with great partners, like Google, to enable these massive strides in interconnection. Now that we have the network infrastructure, we are building our subsidiaries and considering new ways we can provide value through our business. When you’re in a business like ours – our main customer segments are wholesale, transmission, and Internet – the quality of service is just not enough; it is considered as table stakes. Every company in our field offers quality of service, so we needed to add something more on top of that in order to be able to differentiate from the others. So, now we are bringing in additional value-added services like data centers and IT solutions. We recently announced TelCables Europe as a new entity that we formed to serve as our European subsidiary, a digital bridge to other Portugese-speaking countries across the world, and a provider of digital solutions to customers in Europe and the Mediterranean. We also signed an agreement with Start Campus to establish a new point of presence at the carrier neutral SINES data center in Portugal.
What do you expect from Atlantic Convergence 2025?
Even though convergence is an important aspect of what we’re doing with this event, I also expect to see even more of an emphasis specifically on cooperation. We are coming together in order to support our industry and the people we serve, so using this event as a place to explore how we can cooperate more in order to develop business further will be really important. Mutual collaboration and cooperation are going to be the keys to the success of the ongoing development of this region.
