Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) continues to make a growing name for itself in the submarine cabling network system market by securing a new deal to supply Generalized MPLS (GMPLS) technology to West African Cable System's (WACS) extension.
Following the initial deployment of a 14,000 km network last April, WACS will now leverage Alcatel-Lucent's 1620 Light Manager to increase the submarine cable design capacity along the Africa to Europe route from 3.8 Tbps to 5.12 Tbps. In addition, the WACS consortium will leverage Alcatel-Lucent's 1678 Metro Core Connect in the landing points, which will operators of the submarine cable network dynamic and automated service provisioning capabilities.
Spanning 2,000 km between the UK and Portugal, the new 40 Gbps-based network extension will be connected to an undersea network system connecting South Africa, Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Cape Verde and the Canary Islands.
Similar to other submarine cable network networks, the WACS consortium is a multi-company effort that includes 12 service provider partners: Angola Cables, Broadband Infraco, Cable & Wireless, Congo Telecom, MTN, Office Congolais des Postes et Telecommunications, Portugal Telecom / Cabo Verde Telecom, Tata Communications / Neotel, Telecom Namibia, Telkom SA, Togo Telecom and Vodacom.
Africa has become an active submarine cabling market of late. The WACS consortium joins the recently launched Main One cable and the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) consortium's "Africa Coast to Europe" network.
For more:
- see the release here
- TeleGeography has this article
Related articles:
France Telecom, Alcatel-Lucent to build "Africa Coast to Europe" network
Main One to turn up phase 2 of submarine cable network in July
TeleGeography: 16 new submarine cables on tap