Alcatel-Lucent recently announced it will extend the West Africa Cable System (WACS) from Portugal to the U.K. to meet the increasing need for capacity driven by broadband services penetration. Spanning 2,000 km and operating at 40 gigabit per second (40G), this new section will increase the overall design capacity from 3.8 Terabit/s (Tbit/s) to 5.12 Tbit/s, equal to the download of 8 million MP3 files or over 8 thousand DVDs in 60 seconds.  

The company made this extension after the following the successful field trial with Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) of 40G solution. This extension will further bolster connectivity along the Africa-Europe route, by enabling improved communications and Internet services that are crucial for a social and economic development.

The WACS consortium includes Angola Cables, Broadband Infraco, Cable & Wireless (News - Alert), Congo Telecom, MTN, Office Congolais des Postes et Télécommunications,Portugal Telecom / Cabo Verde Telecom, Tata Communications / Neotel (News - Alert), Telecom Namibia, Telkom SA, Togo Telecom and Vodacom. The commercial service is expected to start by 201. WACS will provide the first direct access to the global submarine cable communication network in Namibia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo and the Republic of Congo.

It 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. WACS will deploy advanced GMPLS capabilities providing dynamic and automated service provisioning for highest quality of service. With ‘intelligent’ network management, WACS will be able to optimize the network’s resource usage which will improve the network’s resiliency.

Kobus Stoeder, chairman of the WACS Management Committee said that 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.