Huawei Marine Networks has utilized its 100G transmission solution to complete upgrades on the section from South Africa to Portugal and Portugal to United Kingdom of the West Africa Cable System (WACS).
One of the longest 100G submarine links in the industry has the length of more than 11,450 km to connect the Digital Line Segment (DLS) between South Africa and Portugal. The total length of the cable system will be 14,530 km.
18 international operators and regional carriers are investing in WACS, the largest submarine cable directly linking Southern Africa to Europe.
WACS initially offered a design capacity of 5.12 Terabits per second (Tb/s) split among 14 countries including South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cape Verde, Spain (Canary Islands), Portugal and the United Kingdom.
The upgrade solutions over 11,450 km utilize Huawei Marine’s 3rd generation Soft Decision-Forward Error Correction (SD-FEC) and bit interleaved technologies which guarantee the compatibility of 100 Gb/s channels with 10 Gb/s channels on the existing network, optimizing the available optical spectrum.
Vishen Maharaj, chairperson of the WACS consortium’s Management Committee, said: “We are working to improve the capabilities of the WACS network while maintaining an economically viable and flexible service for customers.”
