{"id":12582,"date":"2012-05-17T00:54:10","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T22:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=12582"},"modified":"2012-05-17T12:04:53","modified_gmt":"2012-05-17T10:04:53","slug":"wacs-ownership-breakdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/telecommunications\/12582\/wacs-ownership-breakdown\/","title":{"rendered":"WACS ownership breakdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

As of last week (May 2012), the $650 million West Africa Cable System (WACS)<\/a>, linking Southern and Western Africa to Europe, is up and running for commercial use.<\/p>\n

The 4-fibre pair system has a design capacity of 5.12 Tbps, of which about 500 Gigabits per second (Gbps) has been lit for the launch.<\/p>\n

The ownership make-up of the 17,200km cable system is intriguing, in that it consists of a consortium of 14 telecoms operators including South Africa\u2019s largest rivals Neotel<\/a> (Tata Communications), Telkom<\/a>, Broadband Infraco<\/a>, MTN<\/a> and Vodacom<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Additional owners include Angola Cables, Cable & Wireless Worldwide, Cabo Verde Telecom, Congo Telecom, Portugal Telecom, SCPT (DRC), Togo Telecom, Namibia \/ BTC, and Vodafone Spain.<\/p>\n

WACS physically lands in South Africa, Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cape Verde, the Canary Islands, Portugal, and the UK.<\/p>\n

At launch, the SA contingent of the consortium insisted that the cable will create further competition and improve broadband services in SA, despite co-ownership by all the country\u2019s major operators.<\/p>\n

Since the cable\u2019s landing on SA soil at Yserfontein in April 2011, MTN has maintained that it is the largest investor in the project.<\/p>\n

Indeed at its commercial launch on Friday (11 May), MTN’s Global Carrier Services’ Commercial Relations Lead for the WACS Consortium, Trevor Martins, said: \u201cMTN is the largest investor in WACS, with commitments in excess of US$100 million, comprising US$90 million system capital contribution and additional capital investments towards the construction of cable landing facilities in Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a tier one investor, MTN CTO, Kanagaratnam Lambotharan said that MTN\u2019s investment in the cable amounts to 11%. This would put it behind Broadband Infraco.<\/p>\n

\u201cBroadband Infraco has invested at the highest possible level in WACS which is a Tier 1 investment, thereby entitling this company to a 11.4% of the total capacity on the WACS system,\u201d the group said in a statement.<\/p>\n

In an interview with BusinessTech, Kobus Stoeder, executive of global capacity at Vodacom, said that Vodacom had invested a 9.5% stake in WACS. He added that the investment differences between the various stakeholders had no bearing on the operating future of the cable.<\/p>\n

Telkom said that most operators share was largely the same, adding that its investment amounted to \u2018sub 10%\u2019. \u201cWe are quite comfortable with the amount that we have invested,\u201d said Johan Meyer, Telkom’s executive for global capacity business.<\/p>\n

Related articles<\/strong><\/p>\n

WACS owners muted on broadband price cuts<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

No new sub-sea cable needed for a decade: Telkom<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

WACS consortium dismisses monopoly talk<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

WACS launches in South Africa<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As of last week, the $650 million West Africa Cable System (WACS), linking Southern and Western Africa to Europe, is up and running for commercial use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":12713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[1876,26,2791,2752,2792,28,2570,65,2826,27,713,2797],"class_list":["post-12582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-telecommunications","tag-broadband-infraco","tag-headline","tag-johan-meyer","tag-kanagaratnam-lambotharan","tag-kobus-stoeder","tag-mtn","tag-tata-communications","tag-telkom","tag-trevor-martins","tag-vodacom","tag-wacs","tag-west-africa-cable-system"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12582"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12715,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12582\/revisions\/12715"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}