The recently completed 14,530 km system upgrade of the West African Cable System (WACS), has gone live after completing a stringent customer certification and testing program, Huawei Marine informed on Tuesday.

WACS is owned and operated by a consortium of 18 international and regional carriers which when launched in 2012, was deployed with 10G technology, and an initial design capacity of 5.12Tbit/s. The upgrade to 100G, uses Huawei’s Soft Decision-Forward Error Correction (SD-FEC) and bit interleaved technologies. Today, the design capacity has increased to 14.5Tbit/s.

“Thanks to the efficiency and expertise of Huawei Marine’s delivery team, coupled with their leading-edge transmission technology, the WACS upgrade was completed smoothly and on time, fulfilling our on-going commitment to our customers,” said Vishen Maharaj, Chairperson of the WACS Consortium’s Management Committee.

“The increasing reliance on internet and mobile applications, high-definition video, and other data intensive applications such as cloud services are fundamental drivers underpinning the increasing demand for bandwidth” said Mike Constable, CEO of Huawei Marine. “The additional capacity now available on the WACS submarine cable will greatly enrich international communications, in turn further stimulating economic development in the West Africa region and the communities it serves.”