WACS lands near Cape Town

Africa's largest capacity fibre optic submarine cable, the West African Cable System (WACS) has landed in SA.

The cable was pulled on shore this morning at the new landing point in Yzerfontein, near Cape Town, which is to become SA's third international fibre gateway.

A cable station is being built for WACS in the area. The other two gateways are Telkom's cable stations in Melkbosstrand and Mtunzini for SAT-2, SAT-3 and SAFE; and Seacom, Eassy and SAFE, respectively.

Telecoms giant Telkom was allocated the responsibility to land the cable in SA.

“The third gateway is quite critical,” says Telkom executive for global capacity Johan Meyer. “The other two gateways have three cables each that are in very close proximity to each other. The risk is that if a ship drags its anchor, it can cut through all three so if one gateway is affected, at least now there are two others. WACS is even more critical, because it has bigger capacity than all the others.”

Casper Chihaka, managing executive of Telkom Wholesale Services, adds that having a third gateway reduces the risk of SA being cut off from the rest of the world.

Satellites cannot act as backup for WACS, since the cable's capacity is larger than all the satellites in the world put together, according to Kobus Stoeder, head of global capacity, wholesale services at Vodacom Business and chairman of the WACS management committee.

Telkom says once WACS commences operations in the first quarter of next year, there will be services provided through three diverse gateways from SA, providing redundancy needed under disastrous conditions.

The landing of the cable at Yzerfontein represents the completion of the main trunk between Europe and SA, according to Angus Hay, Neotel CTO and co-chairman of the WACS management committee.

"Manufacture of the equipment is essentially complete. Installation, commissioning and testing of equipment will follow.”

Spanning the west coast of Africa and terminating in the UK, WACS will enable seamless connectivity into the rest of Europe and America, says Telkom.

“The 14 000km fibre-optic submarine cable system will effectively raise SA's current broadband capacity by over 500Gbps.”

The system is designed to support present and future Internet, e-commerce, data, video and voice services, with the capacity of the entire system being 5.12Tbps.

“The system makes use of dense wavelength division multiplexing technology, which enables bidirectional communications over one strand of fibre, as well as the multiplication of capacity,” according to Telkom.

“Its design of four fibre pair and 128 wavelength technology make WACS the largest cable system to ever land in Sub-Saharan Africa,” says Hay.

“It will be capable of carrying the equivalent traffic of Seacom, Eassy and SAT-3/WASC/SAFE cable systems combined. WACS will meet the demand for capacity well into the first quarter of the 21st Century,” he explains.

The cable will operate at 40Gbps. The new section will increase the overall design capacity from 3.8Tbps to 5.12Tbps, equal to the download of eight million MP3 files, or more than 8 000 DVDs, in 60 seconds.

Under the terms of this contract extension, WACS will deploy advanced generalised multi-protocol label switching capabilities, offering intelligent network management.

The cable system will connect SA to the UK, with landings in Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, C^ote d'Ivoire, Cape Verde, the Canary Islands, and Portugal.

WACS is the first cable to land in Namibia, Togo, DRC, and the Republic of Congo, according to Hay.

It will cost between $600 million and $650 million overall, and has been funded by a consortium that is composed of 12 parties.

Angola Cables, Broadband Infraco, Cable & Wireless, Congo Telecom, MTN, Office Congolais des Postes et T'el'ecommunications, Portugal Telecom/Cabo Verde Telecom, Tata Communications/Neotel, Telecom Namibia, Telkom SA, Togo Telecom and Vodacom, are the investing parties.