Wacs cable in SA: a picture essay

Added by Editor on 15 May 2012. · · Share this Post

Filed under Editor's pick

Last Friday, TechCentral's Craig Wilson travelled to Yzerfontein, the site of the West African Cable System (Wacs) landing station in SA. He took these pictures.

The official opening

A crowd gathers for the opening

The road to the Yzerfontein landing station

The landing site entrance and building

Officially opened on 12 May

The co-location data facilities

Electronic spaghetti

A Telkom technician explaining how thin the cable is

The entrance to the vault where the cable enters the landing site

The vault beneath the landing station

The Wacs cable and its accompanying power cable (iPhone for scale)

The cable and power make their way through the vault

The cable and power head up from the vault into the data centre

One of the Wacs control stations

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  • Richard

    A beautiful thing!

  • nadimm

    Very cool. How about a schematic.

  • Byron_Martin

    Awesome Pictures! Micro-fibre is an awesome form of
    Technology Infrastructure. This thin little cable will be an tremendous boost
    to the South African Telecommunications Infrastructure. 

  • colinza

    For anyone interested the “Electronic spaghetti” is Alcatel-Lucent LightManager DWDM. Guessing 512 10GE channels over 3-4 pairs or something?

  • Candice

    Awesome! Love picture essays!!! DO MORE!

  • Glen

    Oh WOW!  Awesome pics!  Awesome setup.   I recall the Seacom pics that were published on launch, but I don’t seem to recall a vault of some sort.  

  • jacosmitza

    NICE!!!!

    Thank you for the pictures.

  • Bertus

    Hi Tinykov, although the cable is not very heavy, it is much heavier than sea water and it designed with boyancy that makes it sink. Apart from that approximately every 50Km there is a repeater with a huge metal housing ,which also weighs quite a bit. so no problem to keep the cable on the seabed.

    Bertus

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Graham-Knott/721512540 Graham Knott

    This should speed our internet up a bit, now its up to telkom to pull its collective finger and to make it happen. Thank you very much for posting the pictures, much appreciated.

  • Richard Woolf

    Awesome pics

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Johnny-Barrington/607652914 Johnny Barrington

    HI every one.

     

    I use to work for Telkom at the training collage in
    Joburg and when we were doing an Optic Fibre course we took the people out to
    ATC in Brits were they manufacture optic fibre cables.  To see how they make these cables is just incredible.

     

    From a glass rod of +- 1.2m filled with very very clean optical
    glass they can get about 2km of fibre. The glass filled rod is about 2cm in
    diameter and the fibre ends up smaller than your hair.

    Just some info.
    Enjoy

  • Chanyane

    Love the road to the landing station. So peaceful. Wish could get a job there.

  • Trollme

    And guess what ysterfontein does not have internet :D

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