WACS: 400Gbps from day one

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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The West African Cable System (WACS) which is due to be completed in 2011, will link South Africa and the United Kingdom. The cable system is a joint venture between Telkom, Neotel, MTN, Vodacom and the state owned Broadband Infraco.

Along its route, the cable will land in numerous countries, including Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Cape Verde and Portugal are among the planned destinations.

The design capacity of the cable system is set at 3.84Tb/s, with talk of over 5Tb/s being viable in future. This dwarfs other cables such as SAT3 (340Gb/s), SAFE (440Gb/s), SEACOM (1.28Tb/s) and EASSy (1.4Tb/s) – which when combined offer nearly 2.7Tb/s, well under the minimum capacity of WACS.

Speaking at the recent MyBroadband conference, Kobus Stroeder, chairman of the WACS Management Committee, discussed why a high capacity cable was designed, and gave an update on progress of the project.

“The system is a good example of collaboration amongst operators in a single market, and one of the few examples in the world where all major operators have collaborated on a single project,” said Stroeder.

“The [consortium] business model is quite different to that of a privately owned system. Return will be generated from the use of the capacity in the retail sector, and not necessarily just from the wholesale of bandwidth.”

“[WACS] will be equipped for 400Gb/s on day one, and it could potentially be higher. The reason for the capacity is the four fibre pairs, whereas most [systems] have two,” Stroeder explained.

“We have designed the system so that we can have the shortest route, and the lowest latency, from large markets such as Nigeria and South Africa, into Europe with no intermediate landings,” Stroeder continued. There will be a single connection running from South Africa to London.

Right up to the point-of-presence installed in London, the entire system is directly under control of the operator consortium, with no third parties or other systems having an effect between points of interconnect.

“The system contract was signed on the 8th of April. The route survey is completed and the trunk survey is still to be completed. We have started manufacture of equipment – more than 10% of the repeaters have been manufactured,” Stroeder continued.

“Since the conceptual design by all of these operators, they have really illustrated commitment and a single minded focus on their goal – to provide cost effective connectivity between Europe and South Africa, and other African markets,” Stroeder concluded.

WACS cable discussion