As part of its increased focus on business elsewhere on the continent, South Africa’s Internet Solutions (IS), a division of Dimension Data, has lit up fibre capacity it’s bought on the West Africa Cable System (Wacs).
Wacs is a 5,1Tbit/s design capacity subsea cable that run from Yzerfontein, north of Cape Town, to London via West African markets.
IS says in a statement that it has connected Namibia to the system through local implementation partner ITN and to Nigeria, with plans to land capacity in Ghana and Angola soon. It has the option to terminate two 10Gbit/s wavelengths from Cape Town to London. So far, it’s lit one of these wavelengths.
“A number of our South African clients are expanding internationally or have established operations in these regions,” says IS connectivity service executive Sean Nourse. “They therefore require the capabilities to connect with these key economic hubs in West Africa.”
There is also a growing need to provide high-speed outbound international broadband connectivity to the enterprise and small to medium-sized business markets, he says.
The links are designed to complement existing capacity that the company has access to on the older Sat-3 cable system. In the case of Namibia, it is also the first time that the country has been linked to an undersea fibre optic cable system, Nourse says.
The company expects to connect Angola to Wacs soon, too. The country is currently only linked via Sat-3. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
