Information and Communication Technology Technical

WACS unleashes high capacity broadband

by Hans van de Groenendaal, EngineerIT

The West Africa Africa Cable System (WACS) consortium has inaugurated the highest capacity submarine cable system ever to land in sub- Saharan Africa. The 17 200 km cable has unleashed a new wave of broadband capacity on the African continent, linking 14 countries.

Adrian Moss, chairman of the WACS WACS landing points Members of the WACS consortium management committee, said at the official switch-on on 11 May 2012 that the sheer • (Yzerfontein) • Angola Cables volume of capacity will contribute to further • Namibia • Broadband Infraco fostering broadband development; giving • Angola • Cable and Wireless Worldwide impetus to African economies and helping • The Democratic Republic of the Congo • Congo Telecom, to increase the standard and quality of life • The Republic of Congo of its citizens. “The system combines high • MTN • Cameroon robustness and low-latency to meet the • Société Congolaise des Postes et • Nigeria performance and stability required to ensure Telecommunications (SCPT) • Togo seamless traffic handoff for the highest level • PT Comunicacoes • Ghana of efficiency end-to-end.” • Togo Telecom • Ivory Coast The WACS system was supplied as a turnkey • Cape Verde • (Neotel) project by Alcatel-Lucent Sub-marine • The Canary Islands • Telecom Namibia Networks, using 10 Gbps technology as well • Portugal • SA Ltd as 40 Gbps optical coherent dense wave division multiplex (DWDM). It is also the first • United Kingdom • cable system to make use of generalised multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) to provide advanced in-system restoration of wavelengths, increasing network resilience.

Co-chairman of the consortium and GM of strategic business development at Neotel, Dr. Angus Hay said that the route between Cape Town and London is 14 500 km long with the express from South Africa to Portugal 11 500 km, one of the longest sub-marine cable segments in the world. “Latency tests The cable station at Yzerfontein – built, operated and maintained by Telkom. The cost of the facilities will on the system carried out earlier this year from be shared by the WACS consortium parties co-locating their terminal equipment at the station. Yzerfontein to Highbridge in the UK measured a round trip delay of 138,5 ms, the lowest international gateways to minimise the risk of the roll-out of 3700 remote multi-service so far achieved over such a transoceanic complete isolation in the event of a natural access nodes that will replace older distance.” disaster or cable outage,” said Johan Meyer, generation cabinets and add another 1000. WACS has a design capacity of 5,12 Terabits Telkom executive: global capacity. “It also Telkom is also replacing the older digital per second (Tbps) of which approximately means that we can offer our customers subscriber lines access multiplexers with 500 Gbps is current lit. automatic protection on our own cable multi access nodes (MSANs) over a five year systems and are not reliant on arrangements period. The MSANs will be used to offer higher While for some partners in the WACS project it with other carriers. is providing meaningful broadband between speed ADSL (ADSL2+), very high bit rate their country and the rest of the world, for “We have more that 143 000 km terrestrial and fibre to the home. Telkom WACS will complete the company's fibre in the ground comprising a DWDM These new cabinets will offer speeds of up to second ring of capacity around the African automatically switched transport network, 1 Gbps using fibre as the last mile, or up to continent. The first ring is covered by the placing us in the unique position of bringing 40 Gbps using the existing last-mile copper S3WS, EASSy and SMW3 cables. all the capacity offered on WACS closer to infrastructure. business, industry and consumers,” said Meyer. “Telkom now operates sub-marine cable MTN has committed over US$100-million into gateways at Mtunzini, Melkbosstrand and Telkom also recently announced a WACS. Trevor Martins, MTN's representative on Yzerfontein, providing South Africa with three transformation programme which includes the WACS consortium, said that it was critical

26 June 2012 - EngineerIT SAT-3/WASC EASSy SA-MLK SA-MZN Angola Mozambique Gabon Madagascar Cameroon Dar es Salaam Nigeria Tanzania Benin Kenya Ghana Djibouti Ivory Coast EIG 1.92 Tb/s Sudan Senegal Canary Islands COL-3 EIG Portugal Multiple 10 Gb/s India; Oman SMW3 220 Gb/s UAE; Djibouti SAFE Saudi; Egypt SA-MLK Libya; Monaco SA-MZN France; Gibraltar Reunion Portugal, UK Mauritius London_PoP India Malaysia WACS SA-YZF SMW3 Namibia Malaysia Angola India DRC Middle East SAT-3/WASC Congo Europe 340 Gb/s COL-3 Cameroon Nigeria COL3 Togo Portugal SAT-3/WASC&SAFE Ghana USA EASSy Ivory Coast WACS EIG Cape Verde WACS 5.12 Tb/s SAFE 440 Gb/s SMW3 Canary Islands COL3 Portugal UK London_PoP

SAT 3 SAT 1 SAT 2 SMW3 WASC/SAFE EASSy EIG WACS Melkbosstrand (SA) to Funchal (Madeira) to Norden (Germany) to Sesimbra (Portugal) to EASSy 1.4 Tb/s Mtunzini (SA) to Bude (UK) to Yzerfontein (SA) to Sesimbra (Portugal) Melkbosstrand (SA) Okinawa (Japan) Penang (Malaysia) Port Sudan (Sudan) Mumbai (India) London (UK)

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Cables for Africa. WACS landing at Yzerfontein. for MTN, the largest investor on the WACS broadband capacity to the continent, Sub-marine cables have come a project, to ensure direct access to its markets bolstering Africa's efforts to achieve the long way since 1866 when the first in West Africa and linking efficient system United Nation's millennium development sub-marine telegraphs line opened. design with multiple landing points. WACS has goals with its objective of bridging the digital When WACS is fully equipped it will be able 15 terminal stations along its route. divide, by enabling millions of Africans to be to transmit more than one thousand high “The impact of our investment in Africa part of the digital age. WACS, together with resolution movies per second. Today there is is far-reaching,” said Kanaragaratnam our considerable interest in EASSy will provide over 500 000 km of fibre-optic cable on the Lambotharan, CTO of MTN. “Investing in MTN with critical diversity to Europe from both seabed, almost enough to circle the Earth WACS brings much-needed cost-effective sides of our continent." thirteen times.