MAY 22, 2001
PREVIOUS NEWS WIRE FEED
Alcatel to Light W. Africa
PARIS -- Alcatel (NYSE: ALA and Paris: CGEP.PA), world leader in intelligent optical networking,
today announced it has constructed a landing point for SAT-3/WASC WDM Submarine Cable
System in Senegal, which it is currently implementing from end-to-end. Starting from Portugal, the
cable will be laid through to South Africa, allowing several countries along the Western coast of
Africa to be connected to Europe and to benefit from a high capacity link well adapted to new
telecommunications applications, such as the Internet.
Initially, the backbone express route will operate at 20Gbit/s with the potential to be upgraded to
at least 40Gbit/s in the future. However, an option also exists for the system to be expanded to
120Gbit/s, which corresponds to 1,450,000 simultaneous phone conversations. The network will
link Portugal to the Republic of South Africa, undersea. It highlights the advantages of submarine
networks, in a given context, over both terrestrial and satellite networks regarding flexibility, the
rapid turnaround time of the implementation of the works and the ability to provide a large,
upgradable bandwidth.
Once completed, SAT-3/WASC will link up Portugal, Spain, Canary Islands, Senegal, Ivory Coast,
Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Angola and the Republic of South Africa (see map
below). It will also be linked with a network spanning from South Africa to South-East Asia via
India. |
