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Categories: Broadband, IT News, South Africa

New sub-sea cable Wacs to launch in SA in one month

Published by on Apr 13th, 2012, 21 Comments

In about once month’s time a brand new under sea cable called the West African Sea Cable (Wacs) will officially be launched in South Africa. The cable, that measures 14, 000km in length will link Yzerfontein in the Western Cape to London in the UK along the entire West Coast of the African continent.

An official launch event for the new cable will take place next month at the landing site at Yzerfontein, north of Cape Town. The landing points of the cable along the coastline include countries such as Namibia, Angola, The Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Portugal.

Angus Hay, co-chair of the Wacs management committee and chief technology officer at Neotel, who has been commissioned to run the primary network operating centre in Johannesburg, has commented that the testing of the cable has progressed well and that once it has been launched at the site, commercial traffic is likely to become available shortly after. Currently, the cable is in the process of being accepted by Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks, the supplier.

Many South Africans will hope that the introduction of the new giant cable will result in the lowering of broadband pricing across the country and according to Hay, increase and “improve competition”.

The cable that offers a design capacity of 5,1 Tbit/s and cost approximately R5 billion to build provides more than the total capacity of the Sat-3 and SEACOM cables at 1.28 Tbit/s and 340G bit/s respectively.

In November last year, The Wasace Cable Company Worldwide launched a project to construct a new high-capacity submarine telecommunications cable to serve the African continent. The Wasace cable will be connecting Africa with South America, North America and Europe. eFive Telecommunications, is also leading a rival project to build the SAex cable that will connect Angola and South Africa to Brazil (see green cable in the image above).

Source: Tech Central

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Comments

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=623828572 Warren Fabricius

    Fairly simple approach is to actually ask the ISP’s and hosting companies (Axxess, MWEB, WebAfrica, Hetzner etc) what this means for the customer, and make their comments public. 

  • Foodforensics

    Mweb and Axxess and others are part the Internet Solutions Group/ Company (IS) so be interesting what IS have to say and will do!!

  • Sean Redmond

    I shall wait in anticipation and see.

  • Pacaratc

    Never had a single cents wortt of price reduction as a residential user.

    I want speed not a better cap that I nver use

  • http://twitter.com/LydonZA Lydon

    Then you are DEFINITELY in the minority. There’s absolutely no point having a 100Mbps line with a 3GB cap as was the case until the likes of MWeb started a price war. Regardless, as has been said before, this is unlikely to change much in the form of pricing, as it is now local (Telkom) infrastructure that is costing ISP’s, and thus us, money.

  • Duncan

    This article is lifted almost word for word from http://www.techcentral.co.za. Please take down this piece immediately ask our permission before lifting our copyrighted content in future.

    Duncan McLeod
    Editor
    TechCentral

  • Rstobbs

    Will believe this if and when it happens – we been ripped off far too many times before.

  • JustAnotherUser

    MWeb didn’t really start the price-ware… Afrihost was the first to offer R29/GB way back in 2009 when MWeb still offered R80/GB

  • Guest

    WoW!!! Duncan is right. This is bad journalism :-(

  • palerider

    Source: Tech Central
    …can you not read editor? haha

  • Skunkff

    Tech central is mentioned as the source. Duncan McLeod the highlander.
    There can be only one.

  • KaGeN10-

    Nonsense MWEB is owned by Multichoice has nothing to do with IS.

  • Kagen10-

    Yeah before we cry as we are mentioned as the source…highlander

  • Phatcat

     Duncan – you must feel a bit stupid right about now…. lol

  • Toxicbunny

    Ummmm yes they did… it was called affordable Uncapped accounts that actually WORKED.

  • Kelly Levinsohn

    Hi Duncan,

    In response to your comment, I did not mean to offend you in any way and was not aware that permission was required in order to use the facts presented in your article. 

    In future should Bandwidth Blog look to source content from your site, we will contact you directly. 

    My intention was to credit Tech Central to ensure that neither I nor Bandwidth Blog were claiming the information as our own. 

    The article has since been re-written and Tech Central remains the primary source. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/Fila82 Felicity Rocksta Moody

    MWEB purchases all their bandwidth from IS, so yes, their prices are dependant on IS, but they just grossly inflate the markup…

  • Duncan

    Thanks, Kelly. I have no objection to Bandwidth Blog using TechCentral as a source – in fact, I’d welcome it – but I was taking exception to this website simply copying and pasting our article basically verbatim.

    I appreciate the response.

    Duncan

  • Tim

    not true. IS managed MWEB’s dial ISP infrastructure (may still, don’t know), but Telkom used to supply their ADSL. MWEB have since been building out their own infrastructure and offering uncapped accounts with the availability of the new undersea cables on the east coast

  • Robo

    All the supposed new cables mentioned here coming after WACS have no funding and most are VERY unlikely to happen. ACE is on the map down to SA…but only has funding to West Africa and will almost certainly never come down to SA. eFive’s SAex are still struggling for funding but may get it and could be in the water in 2014-15. WASACE is a complete joke and whoever funds it will lose a great deal of money!

  • Insame

    There is nothing stupid about theft. Duncan is correct, it also creates duplicate content and in the end Google ignores one of the articles. It picked this one up but not the TechCentral article.

http://www.bandwidthblog.com/wp-content/themes/cnnetwork