Agence Ecofin reports that the Africa Coast Europe (ACE) cable has landed in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. Commenting on the development, the country’s telecoms minister, Cheikh Bamba Dieye, said that the new ACE link would provide much needed capacity to meet rising demand for voice and data from the population, as well as supporting various e-government, e-health, e-education and local content efforts. The new ACE cable will eventually span 17,000km along the west coast of Africa and connect more than 20 countries between France and South Africa.
According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, in December 2012 France Telecom-Orange (FT-Orange) announced the launch of the first phase of the ACE undersea cable link, which saw the first stage of the project go ‘live’ in France, Portugal, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Sao Tome & Principe. Seven additional countries – Canary Islands (Spain), Benin, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Namibia and South Africa – will be connected in the second phase. In addition, two landlocked countries, Mali and Niger, will be connected through extensions to the terrestrial network. Finally, Nigeria will also be connected to the cable, sometime in 2013. The cable’s construction amounts to a total investment of around USD700 million for the consortium, with around USD250 million financed by the FT-Orange Group and its subsidiaries. Overall capacity on the cable will eventually reach 5.12Tbps.