IS connects directly into WACS

INTERNET

Dimension Data subsidiary, Internet Solutions (IS) has boosted its ability to deliver capacity on the West Africa Cable System (WACS) to clients following the launch of a fibre optic cable ring between the WACS landing station and the IS Cape Town Internet Data Centre (IDC) facility.

“We have completed the roll-out of a 100Gbps dual-route cable system between the WACS landing station located in Yzerfontein, north of Cape Town and our Cape Town IDC,” explains Prenesh Padayachee, chief technology officer at IS. “This protected cable system improves the delivery of the capacity IS has secured on WACS, and allows us to seamlessly upgrade capacity to the cable system as required.”

IS has secured more capacity on WACS than it has on the SAT-3 cable, making it the company's primary link on the west coast. “WACS utilises newer technology than SAT-3, which is why we have chosen to make it a more integral part of our resilient international network. WACS also provides an additional failover to support the capacity we have on the various other undersea cable systems,” explains Padayachee.

“Through WACS, IS aims to enable greater international communication, collaboration and e-commerce capabilities for our South African clients, while also providing high speed, high capacity connectivity to our data centre network for the growing west African market,” he continues. “Our ability to provision these capabilities is made significantly easier following the completion of the direct fibre ring system between the WACS landing station and the IS Cape Town IDC.”

According to Padayachee, this fibre ring system also offers a host of other benefits as the investment future-proofs IS's capacity and capabilities on WACS and gives the service provider landing station diversity on the west coast. “We have a total capacity on this fibre ring system of 4Tbps, which we can light-up with minor equipment changes. This means that with just 100Gbps currently live we have significant room for growth. This allows us to rapidly scale bandwidth upwards to meet growing demand without having to rely on a third party.”

Padayachee explains that these factors are significant from a client perspective as IS can now offer seamless failover to two west coast cable systems where the one terrestrial portion, at an optical layer, is under the full control of IS, not an independent third party.

“This enables IS to rapidly resolve any issues and ensures greater accountability on our part. This should offer our clients, for whom international connectivity is mission critical, greater peace of mind. This system is also designed to better support all of the current and future needs of our clients, especially as more begin to make use of bandwidth-intensive hosted applications or communicate using media-rich video content or collaboration tools,” he concludes.