West Africa Cable System
| West Africa Cable System (WACS) | |
|---|---|
| Owners: Consortium of 12 carriers: MTN Group, Angola Cables, Broadband Infraco, Cable & Wireless, Congo Telecom, Office Congolais des Postes et Telecommunications (OCPT), PT Comunicações, Togo Telecom, Tata Communications, Telecom Namibia, Telkom SA and Vodacom | |
Landing points
| |
| Total length | 14500 km |
| Topology | trunk and branch |
| Design capacity | 14.5 Tbit /s |
| Currently lit capacity | 500 Gbit /s |
| Technology | Fibre-optic DWDM |
| Date of first use | 11 May 2012 |
The West Africa Cable System (WACS) is a submarine communications cable linking South Africa with the United Kingdom along the west coast of Africa that was constructed by Alcatel-Lucent. The cable consists of four fibre pairs and is 14,530 km in length, linking from Yzerfontein in the Western Cape of South Africa to London in the United Kingdom. It has 14 landing points, 12 along the western coast of Africa (including Cape Verde and Canary Islands) and 2 in Europe (Portugal and England) completed on land by a cable termination station in London. The total cost for the cable system is $650 million. WACS was originally known as the Africa West Coast Cable (AWCC) and was planned to branch to South America but this was dropped and the system eventually became the West African Cable System.