Today, the West African Cable Systems (WACS), arrived at the shores of Cape Town in South Africa. The cable connects to the United Kingdom through the West African coast where it has 11 connection points in the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, the DRC, Angola and Namibia.
With a total 5.12 Terabits capacity, the cable becomes Africa’s largest cable installed to date. The second largest is the 4.72 Terabit EASSy cable running along Africa’s east coast. The WACs cable is expected to be launched for commercial use in the first quarter of 2012.
A US$ 600 million project, WACS is owned by a consortium of telecoms firms that include South Africa’s Telkom, Neotel, MTN, Vodacom, Gateway Communications and Broadband Infraco.
The cable becomes the third cable to land in South Africa in less than 2 years. The Seacom cable went live in mid 2009, and EASSy, last year in July. WACS’ landing brings the total international undersea bandwidth capacity on South Africa’s shores to 11.5 Terabits.
image credit: manypossibilities.net/african-undersea-cables
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In the mother city were dev makes it happen.
Africom will be connecting to this cable soon…..
which cables are Afri-com, Telone, Powertel and Econect currenlty connected to at the moment?
Africom is Seacom through Moza, TelOne is EASSy through Moza as well, Econet is Seacom through Betbridge, PowerTel is to Botswana. onward connection to the sea might be through a number of different redundant links.
Any idea when the operators will start availing meaningful bandwidth? I understand Econet at a number of their 3G sites is technically capable of up to 3.6 HSUPA
Thanks soul, had a similar question. lol. Out of curiosity, which cable link is better in terms of quality.
definately not the one going through beitbridge,lol!
Hard to say Kurai…
How about tweets, chats and blogs with my mukomana wemombe kumusha. Be warned “Cheeeeeeeep broadband ahead”. lol
Hi
Don’t forget that this capacity will not be commercially available until about April 2012.
Also remember the cost from the sea (say CPT/Joburg, Maputo etc) to Harare is as least as expensive as the undersea fiber (in many cases even more). i.e. don’t expect prices to drop that much until we have more competition – and it’s not just up to the Zimbabwean ISPs – you’d be shocked to know what our brothers in Botswana and Mozambique charge for Zimbabwe to transit through them 🙁
A landlocked country like Zimbabwe is really screwed from this perspective. One hopes that Govt puts pressure on neighbours to be reasonable. Lower comms costs would boost our economy.
Regards
David