The upgrade covers the route linking Western Europe, West Africa and South Africa, which spans 18 landing stations. It uses Ciena’s 6500 platform, powered by WL6e, which Ciena Services is deploying over ACE’s existing submarine line terminal equipment. Ciena says this reduces the need for complex traffic migrations and limits disruption to live services.
“International routes drive economic growth, digital inclusion, and cloud adoption across Africa,” said Philippe Recco, President of the ACE Management Committee. ACE says the system connects more than 500 million people across 20 countries, including landlocked markets such as Mali and Niger via land links.
Ciena will also manage ongoing maintenance and transformation as ACE prepares for greater demand. Thomas Soerenson, Ciena’s vice president of global subsea, said the work will expand existing infrastructure “with minimal operational impact”.
The consortium will also use Ciena’s Navigator Network Control Suite for visualisation and management of its services. Liquid Spectrum apps such as Channel Margin Gauge give real-time visibility of signal-to-noise ratio margin on each wavelength, helping ACE identify where it can add capacity.
The cable entered service in December 2012. Newer systems are now adding capacity along the same corridor, with Meta having completed the core 2Africa system last year, with a total trunk capacity of around 180Tbps.
Resilience remains a concern for the region. In March 2024, faults on four West African cables, including ACE, caused outages across the region, with operators seeking alternative capacity on Google’s Equiano cable.
Ciena is at Submarine Networks World in Singapore (booth H03), where it will take part in a keynote and panel discussion on 23 September.
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