WACS cable landing station officially belongs to Cameroon

The State of Cameroon has formally approved the landing station of the West African Cable System Cable (WACS) built by the mobile operator MTN.

The Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Jean-Pierre Biyi Bi Essam, and the Director General of MTN Cameroon, Karl Toriola, signed the agreement of this technological infrastructure yesterday during a ceremony held in the Cameroonian capital.

For the owner of the Cameroon subsidiary of the South African telecoms group, this sale marks a key step in the public-private partnership guarantor of innovative services and quality and lower costs between Cameroon and the mobile phone company. It is also a key step in the provision of broadband to Cameroonians.

The WACS are 14,500 km, with a capacity of 5.2 Tbps for a wavelength of 40 Gbps and they will strengthen the capacity of telecommunications in the country offered by the 12-year-old SAT-3, 12 with a capacity of 354 Gbps.

The WACS station based in Limbe, the capital of the South West, is evaluated at more than two billion FCFA, according to the financial audit conducted by Axxis firm, more than 2 billion CFA francs.

Minister Biyiti-Bi Essam, explained that this "digital airport" will be managed by the Cameroon Telecommunications (Camtel), a public enterprise telecom representing Cameroon in the WACS consortium. The country is affiliated to the business combination with an interest in the 12 billion FCFA optical fibre submarine cable.

For this investment, one of the major conditions for the State was to subsequently negotiate the acquisition of the landing station at MTN. A redemption that allows Cameroon to have the monopoly on this infrastructure, according to law 2010/013 of 21 December 2010 governing electronic communication.

CAMTEL will "ensure that principle of open source which ensures all operators have access to broadband at affordable costs," stressed the Minister of Telecommunications.