Spanning 15,000km in length from Portugal along the African west coast, Equiano features 12 fibre pairs delivering a total of 144Tbps of capacity. WIOCC is an investor in Equiano, owning a full fibre pair on the system in addition to submarine line terminal equipment from Ciena.
“This collaboration offers us the best lead times, a great commercial proposition and high-quality, accessible technical support – all vital as we expand our ability to support the cloud and wholesale community in Africa," said Chris Wood, CEO of WIOCC Group.
"Not only has this allowed us to pre-install our SLTE in Open Access Data Centre (OADC) facilities in Lagos, Nigeria, and Rondebosch, South Africa – meaning we’ll be able to light up our capacity as soon as the Equiano system goes live – but it’s also optimised budget utilisation, enabling us to invest further in other parts of our network.”
Together with Ciena WIOCC can accelerate its activation and add to its capacity to meet expanding demand for connectivity in South Africa, Nigeria and neighbouring countries.
Spectrum sharing is also supported across the network, enabling WIOCC to broaden its service portfolio.
“We’re also teaming up with Ciena on the new 2Africa submarine cable, on which we own a fibre pair across the system. The cable, now in deployment and scheduled to go live in stages throughout 2023 and 2024, will land directly in the new carrier-neutral OADC facility in Durban,” added Wood.
To do this, WIOCC is deploying Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme Solution, which uses the 6500 Reconfigurable Line System, WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics and Manage, Control and Plan domain controller.
In addition, Ciena Services is providing turnkey planning, design and deployment services for the project.
“Having worked with us on other African cables, WIOCC is again entrusting us to maximise its network assets," said Ian Clarke, vice president of global submarine solutions, Ciena.
"Our collaboration is ensuring the systems, and regions, keep pace with bandwidth demands while reducing transport costs. Together, we’re making connectivity smarter and faster, utilising software automation and AI to bring it ever closer to end users.”
