Business and personal Internet users in Namibia will soon benefit from faster and higher-capacity "real time" data transmission capacity following Namibia's connection to the 14,000-km undersea fibre-optic cable known as the West Africa Cable System (WACS). This has been installed by France's Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks in a project connecting 14 countries, from South Africa along the West African coast to the UK. The Namibian section of the cable was brought ashore at Swakopmund in early February and is a joint venture between the Botswana and Namibia telecommunication corporations, which each contributed US$38m to the US$785m total project cost. WACS is due to become fully operational from mid-2011, at a design capacity of just over five terabytes per second, equivalent to 8,000 DVD downloads. It will also improve voice quality and enable video conferencing.