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WACS launched in South Africa
The 5.12Tbps WACS cable was launched in South Africa today, boosting the country’s international bandwidth capacity
WACS promises lowest latency link to Europe
| Rudolph Muller | August 31, 2010 | No comments |
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 WACS cable is set to give South Africans a dedicated connection to Portugal
The West Africa Cable System (WACS) is another undersea cable due to enter commercial service in 2011.
The cable is a joint venture between Telkom, Neotel, MTN, Vodacom and Broadband Infraco, with landing points planned in South Africa, Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Republic of Congo, Canary Islands, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Cape Verde, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
Alcatel-Lucent recently announced that it had been awarded the contract to extend the cable from Portugal to the United Kingdom using their “40G” fibre cable technology.
Deployment of the cable system began in 2009 with a design capacity of 3.81 Terrabits per second (Tbps). The design capacity was later increased to 5.12 Tbps.
Kobus Stroeder, chairman of the WACS Management Committee, explained that this design capacity is calculated by using the number of fibre pairs, number of wavelengths per fibre pair and amount of capacity per wavelength.
In the case of WACS there are four fibre pairs, 128 wavelengths per pair, running at 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) per wavelength. Using standard SI conversions rather than binary usage conversions this yields the current design capacity of 5.12 Tbps.
According to Alcatel-Lucent the “40G” cable to connect Portugal and United Kingdom runs at 40 Gbps per wavelength.
The SEACOM cable terminates in Marseille, France and EASSy’s closest landing point to Europe is Port Sudan, Sudan. ISPs then have to acquire their own capacity on one of the Mediterranean undersea cables to be able to connect from one of the East coast cable systems to the UK.
Stroeder explained that WACS will have a fibre pair dedicated to connecting South Africa to Portugal. This will be a much shorter path than the Indian Ocean routes, he said.
It would even provide shorter latencies than on the ageing SAT-2 cable which lands in Spain and Portugal as you’d have to go through mainland Spain to get to the rest of Europe.
WACS will also have a point of presence (POP) in London. Stroeder said that this means that ISPs “won’t be held ransom” to connect from Europe to the UK as they are on other cable systems.
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