Chapter 1: Background to SACC
Harold Wilson's Labour Government, it's said, did not want to be publicly seen supporting the then apartheid government of South Africa’s wish to improve their telecommunications to the rest of the world by installing a submarine coax telephone cable, so he would not allow the 100% government owned (and hence had no choice) Cable & Wireless Plc to run any of the relay stations for the project.
Left:
SACC Building in Georgetown (Middle of the big Buildings to the left of the picture)
Coaxial submarine coax cables used underwater valve amplifiers (transistors were unreliable back then) at regularly spaced intervals to keep the signal above the noise.
These repeaters needed quite a lot of electric power to be fed down the coax to keep them running.
The maximum length between land repeater stations to feed the power was limited to a few thousand
miles, so the South Africans needed somewhere friendly.
Anywhere on the African mainland was impossible politically, also probably South America.
So the political solution was for Cable & Wireless to allow a South African company to operate the repeater station on Ascension Island.
This was despite the Cable & Wireless monopoly on International civilian telecommunications for the Island.
Many in Cable & Wireless disliked the political interference.
.
So
the South Atlantic Cable Company SACC (a division of
South African post Office) was formed
it was based in Johannesburg
and it ran all the stations in the link, Cape town,
Ascension, Cap Verde, Tenerife,
and finally
Sintra (Portugal). Connections on other systems linked to Europe including UK, and on as required, NASA had links from Ascension
to Houston on the SACC cable for instance, used as back up for the satellite links over Cable & Wireless’ ASC-1N Antenna on Donkey Plain (See Cable & Wireless).
SACC stayed on the island until 1992 when the SAT-1 cable was shut down. It should have gone earlier but was kept running for a while longer until the Earth Station on Cape Verde was completed, so as not to cut off communication to the Island.
The Cable was one of the last Sub-Coaxial's left when it was closed
Left:
An old letter head from SACC head office Dated in 1967.
Showing their location and directors at the time
(Obtained from C&W Collections)