The launch of the West Africa Cable System in Cape Town recently heralds a new chapter in the development of connectivity across the continent.
Leaders in the Consortium behind WACS offered a number of astounding facts, figures and hypothesis that help put the relevance of this initiative in perspective.
- If one was able to physically pull the length of cable, end-to-end, it has sufficient length to ‘go around the earth’ three times
- Impossible although it would be, if one could lift the entire system at once, it would equate to the same weight as lifting 20 A380 jumbo jets
- The trunk route on WACS from Cape Town to London is over 14,500km long, with the express from South Africa to Portugal being 11,500km.
- The 4-fibre pair system has a design capacity of 5.12 Terabytes per second (Tbps)
- The system makes use of both 10Gbps and 40Gbps technology on different segments
- WACS was the first submarine cable system ever to make use of Generalised Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) to provide advanced in-system restoration of wavelengths, increasing network resilience
- The WACS cabling route includes fibre optic amplifiers that are designed to boost power surging through the lines. 256 optical amplifiers have been laid down
- The ships used by supplier Alcatel-Lucent in the laying of cables are designed to manoeuvre 360-degrees
- In laying the cables, up to two meters of the ocean-bed is ‘ploughed’ or made ready for the cables, up to 6000km of cable/ 600 tons is stored on one ship
- Up to 10 500 volts passes through the cable system
Chris Tredger
