Name and Location
West African Cable System (Wacs) project, South Africa to Europe.

Project Description
Wacs, formerly the African West Coast Cable (AWCC) initiative, is a 14 000-km-long fibre-optic submarine telecommunications (telecoms) cable system, which will stretch from the Western Cape, in South Africa, to London, in the UK.

The cable system initially had an overall design capacity of 3.8 Tb/s, which was subsequently upgraded to 5.12 Tb/s, making it the highest capacity cable on the African continent to date.

The system will make use of dense wavelength division multiplexing technology, which enables bidirectional communications over one strand of fibre, as well as the multiplication of capacity.

Other landing points for the cable include Angola, Namibia, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Cape Verde, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo Republic, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Portugal, the Canary Islands and the UK.

The cable will also support South Africa's science projects, such as the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, for which the country is currently competing against Australia.

Value
The project is estimated at $650-million.

Duration
The cable was initially expected to be ready for commercial use in the third quarter of 2011, however, it will now be fully completed and ready in early 2012.

Client
The Wacs consortium, comprising Angola Cables, Broadband Infraco, Cable & Wireless, Congo Telecom, MTN Group, Office Congolais des Postes et Telecommunications, PT Comunicações, Vodacom group, Tata Communications, Cape Verde Telecom, Neotel, Telecom Namibia, Telkom South Africa and Togo Telecom.

Key Contracts and Suppliers
Alcatel-Lucent (manufacture and installation).

Latest Developments

October 2011
Neotel has been contracted to run the primary Network Operating Centre (NOC) for the Wacs.

The NOC requires highly specialised skills to oversee the operation, maintenance, configuration, testing and monitoring of the Wacs cable. Through this contract, and as a consequence of Neotel’s global connections through Tata Communications, the company is creating about ten skilled jobs in South Africa, and facilitating skills development and knowledge transfer into the country.

Meanwhile, Wacs landed in Cape Town in May. The system will span the west coast of Africa and terminate in the UK, enabling seamless connectivity into the rest of Europe and the US.

April 2011
The Wacs cable has reached the beach at Ysterfontein, in South Africa’s Western Cape province. The cable is expected to raise the country’s current broadband capacity by over 500 Gb/s.

Although Telkom South Africa is the landing party for the Wacs cable in South Africa, it will be operated on an open-access policy with other local shareholders in the cable, which includes Broadband Infraco, MTN, Neotel and Vodacom.

Telkom will own, operate and maintain the cable landing station, but the other telecoms providers will have access to the facility and will be able to ‘colocate’ their services within the station.

According to contractual agreements, the Wacs cable is the first truly open-access cable on the African continent. This allows all stakeholding operators to land capacity in terms of the agreement, as well as having open-access in terms of cross connections (direct wavelength access), ability to colocate at the cable landing station, as well as ability to backhaul services from the cable landing station to Cape Town.

The backhaul terrestrial links from the landing station to Cape Town are not yet in place, and the five operators are likely to share infrastructure, rather than dig individual trenches for the terrestrial cable.

In addition, the parties are likely to share infrastructure costs, however, they will operate their portion of the cable independently. It is up to each operator to generate returns from its portion of the capacity procured.

MTN, the largest single investor in the Wacs cable system with $90-million, will receive 11% of the initial capacity when it becomes commercially available. Other operators have not disclosed details of their investments in the Wacs cable.

Meanwhile, construction of cable stations in all the countries where the cable lands is under way, with installation, commissioning and testing of all the equipment scheduled to begin soon.

Further, environmental-impact assessment delays at the Ysterfontein site have affected the construction of the cable station, which is not yet complete. However, tenders have been renegotiated for faster completion and the station is expected to be finished by the end of July 2011.

November 2009
During the development of the construction and maintenance agreement for the AWCC initiative, the large telecommunications companies withdrew from the project in favour of the SAT4 initiative.

Both initiatives were underfunded.

As a result of cooperation between the two initiatives, the AWCC project was terminated and the completed work was incorporated into the Wacs project.

May 2009
Tata Communications has announced its participation in the project.

On Budget and on Time?
The project is in progress.

Contact Details for Project Information
Alcatel-Lucent media relations, Peter Benedict, tel +33 1 40 76 5084 or email peter.benedict@alcatel-lucent.com; or Régine Coqueran-Gelin, tel +33 1 40 76 4924 or email regine.coqueran@alcatel-lucent.com.
Telkom South Africa media relations senior specialist Pynee Chetty, tel +27 12 311 5247 or email chettpr2@telkom.co.za; or media relations specialist Leigh-Ann Francis, tel +27 12 311 7114 or email francilm@telkom.co.za.