Monday, December 10, 2007

East African Consortium Selects Alcatel-Lucent for Submarine Cable

The East Africa Marine System Ltd (TEAMS) consortium awarded a contract valued at US$79 million to Alcatel-Lucent to deploy a 4,900 km submarine cable network connecting the port city of Mombasa in Kenya with the port of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The cable will be upgradeable to 640 Gbps.



Network installation is scheduled by the end of the first quarter 2009. The Alcatel-Lucent managed solution will be based on its 1620 Light Manager next-generation DWDM submarine platform, and will also include cable and submarine repeaters. As part of the turnkey contract, Alcatel-Lucent will also deploy its deploy its 1678 Metro Core Connect (MCC) in the landing stations located in Mombasa and Fujairah. The Alcatel-Lucent 1350 management system will supervise all the equipment supplied. Alcatel-Lucent will also provide professional services, including project management, engineering, marine operation, and installation testing and commissioning, will be also part of this turnkey project.



The TEAMS consortium includes the Government of Kenya and Etisalat (Emirates Telecom Corporation) of the UAE.

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

  • In March 2007, Alcatel-Lucent announced that the East Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) consortium had selected it to build an undersea cable system that will span nearly 10,000 km, linking eight countries from Sudan to South Africa, via Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and Mozambique. Landings will be located in Port Sudan, Djibouti (Djibouti), Mogadishu (Somalia) Mombasa (Kenya), Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania), Toliary (Madagascar), Maputo (Mozambique) and Mtunzini (South Africa). The cable system will have a scalable capacity of 320 Gbps. It will also interconnect with the Sea-Me-We 3, Sea-Me-We 4, SAS1, Falcon and SAT3/ WASC /SAFE undersea cable systems. Financial terms were not disclosed.