Thread: West Africa Cable System and Namibia

This project really excites me and I'm happy to hear from our dear Minister that Namibia and Botswana entered into an agreement to participate in the West Africa Cable System project, which will bring a landing point to Swakopmund and introduce broadband services to both countries.

From what I can gather the cable system will provide a high-speed fibre optic network linking southern and western Africa to Europe. The 3.84Tbps WACS will connect to more than 13 countries and provide the first ever international submarine connections to Namibia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Congo and Togo and will hopefylly introduce low-cost bandwidth connections to South Africa and Nigeria as well as other strategic West African countries for serving its multinational customers.

At present many countries in our region are reliant on satellite broadband connections to ensure their bandwidth requirements are met. Once the WACS cable has been deployed these countries are stand to benefit from reduced costs and an easier path to up-scaling bandwidth.

Costing about $600-million, submarine Networks will be supplying a 14,000 km long cable system with all associated landing points. This is expected to be ready by 2011.



Kaapanda's full speech is here: http://www.hellonam.com/speeches-sta...html#post47991