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a submarine cable between West Africa and Europe

ACE cable map and its connectivity (new window)

Last December, the Group signed a memorandum of understanding relating to the construction of a new fibre optics submarine cable. To ensure the successful completion of this enormous and ambitious project, it is working in partnership with a large number of international operators. The cable constructed by this consortium will give 20 countries of the West African coastal region the opportunity for connections with Europe and the rest of the world, it will also allow to the Group to pursue its contribution to reducing the digital divide.

from Gabon to France
Given the attractive name of ACE, for Africa Coast to Europe, this approximately 12,000 km-long cable will stretch from Gabon to France. It will connect up Gabon, Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Conakry, Guinea Bissau, Senegal, Gambia, Cape Verde, Mauritania, Morocco, Spain, Portugal and France.

for Western African customers
For Mauritania, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Togo, etc, the construction of this cable represents a direct access to the broadband arteries that connect up the world. For companies in these countries, it represents access to means of communication and exchange allowing them to increase their growth and competitiveness and promote high bandwidth services such as broadband Internet, videotelephony, etc to their customers. Other applications, such as distance learning and telemedicine, could experience a real boom in countries where transportation systems are still being developed.

service quality and security
ACE will offer an alternative to the route followed by Sat3-Wasc-Safe, the only cable that currently runs along the West African coastal region. This will consequently increase the quality of service and security. If one cable has to be repaired, the traffic could be carried on the second. In the Ivory Coast and Cameroon, for example, the entire Internet traffic is currently carried just by Sat3-Wasc-Safe.

cutting-edge technology
Nothing is too good for ACE. It will benefit from the most powerful technology currently used in the submarine cable sector: wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM)*. Its operation will be perfectly compatible with existing systems, thus providing connectivity with Europe, America and Asia.

our presence in this region of the world
The Group is already a joint owner of several submarine cable systems in this region of the world: Sat3-Wasc-Safe, one of the longest cables in the world, which links Portugal to Malaysia and runs along the west coast of Africa, and Atlantis 2, which connects Portugal and Argentina via Senegal, the Cape Verde Islands and Brazil.

* In fiber-optic communications, wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) is a technology which multiplexes multiple optical carrier signals on a single optical fiber by using different wavelengths (colours) of laser light to carry different signals. This allows for a multiplication in capacity, in addition to enabling bidirectional communications over one strand of fiber. This is a form of frequency division multiplexing (FDM) but is commonly called wavelength division multiplexing.

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