WACS consortium and Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) announced Wednesday that they signed a turnkey contract valued at several hundred million US dollars to deploy a new submarine cable network that will provide the first direct connection between Southern Africa and Europe. Commercial service is expected in 2011.
Dubbed the West Africa Cable System, this 14,000 km-long submarine network system is expected to boost Internet and other communications capabilities to and from the African continent.
In addition, this new submarine cable network will offer route diversity and bandwidth availability, and the first global submarine fiber connection to Namibia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo and the Republic of Congo.
Under the terms of the contract, Alcatel-Lucent will provide connectivity between South Africa and Portugal. WACS will link South Africa to the UK with landings in Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Cape Verde, the Canary Islands, and Portugal.
The WACS will open access to faster connectivity to support innovative IP-based services such as video applications for e-education and healthcare. It will further enable the landing countries to be served by a new system offering greater capacity and lowering the cost of broadband access.
The WACS consortium consists of 11 parties - Angola Telecom, Broadband Infraco, Cable & Wireless, MTN, Portugal Telecom, Sotelco, Tata Communications, Telecom Namibia, Telkom SA, Togo Telecom and Vodacom.
ALU is currently trading at $2.09%, up $0.05 or 2.45%, on a volume of about 8.0 million shares.
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