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WACS extended to UK by Alcatel-Lucent
| Jan Vermeulen | August 25, 2010 | No comments |
Jan Vermeulen
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The West Africa Cable System, another new undersea cable system to connect South Africa to Europe and set to launch during 2011, gets extended from Portugal to the UK
Alcatel-Lucent announced that it will extend the West Africa Cable System (WACS) from Portugal to the UK.
Deployment of the WACS cable began in 2009 and it is set to enter commercial service in 2011.
The extension to the cable system will span 2,000 km and operate at 40 gigabit per second (40G). This new section will increase the overall design capacity from 3.8 terabit per second (Tbps) to 5.12 Tbps, stated Alcatel-Lucent.
The WACS consortium is composed of 12 parties: Angola Cables, Broadband Infraco, Cable & Wireless, Congo Telecom, MTN, Office Congolais des Postes et Télécommunications, Portugal Telecom / Cabo Verde Telecom, Tata Communications / Neotel, Telecom Namibia, Telkom SA, Togo Telecom and Vodacom.
With commercial service expected by 2011, WACS will connect South Africa to the UK with landings in Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Cape Verde, the Canary Islands, and Portugal.
Under the terms of this contract extension, WACS will deploy Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS) capabilities, Alcatel-Lucent said.
“The African continent is definitely one of the continents still yearning for affordable connectivity,” said Kobus Stoeder, Chairman of the WACS Management Committee. “This network will enable the landing countries to be served by a new system offering greater capacity and lowering the cost of broadband access in support of innovative applications such as e-education and e-health that can positively impact peoples’ lives.”
Philippe Dumont, head of Alcatel-Lucent’s submarine network activity said that their 40G technology would help end-users enjoy the best experience possible. “As traffic grows, service providers need to optimize their networks in support of end-users’ bandwidth demands for broadband services.”
WACS extension to the UK << comments and discussion
