Leading pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom, a subsidiary of Econet Global, has completed 100 Gigabytes per-second network upgrade to key routes on the East Africa Fibre Ring which connects Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya.
The latest upgrade allows Liquid Telecom to offer the largest core network back-haul capacity in Africa including Zimbabwe.
Liquid Telecom Zimbabwe on its own has been operating under a scalable 40 Gigabytes per second capacity while the operator’s local customers are consuming 19 Gigabytes per second leaving the service provider sitting on an extra capacity of 21 Gbps as of December 2016. This is by far the largest network capacity offered to the Zimbabwean market with other Internet Service Providers far from reaching Liquid Telecom Zim’s benchmark.
The recent upgrade to 100Gig wavelengths takes advantage of the latest Dense-Wavelengths Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology from Ekinops allowing Liquid Telecom to offer the largest lit backhaul capacity in Africa.
The emergent of high Internet Speeds in this Long Term Evolution generation
It offers up to 10 times the speed of previously used 10G waves, positioning Liquid Telecom in a position to provide its enterprise and wholesale customers with additional capacity and increased speeds.
For the first time, Liquid Telecom will provide 100G links to the cities of Kigali in Rwanda, Kampala and Tororo in Uganda, and Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya, with further 100G upgrades planned for the East Africa Fibre Ring in the near future.
“By upgrading to 100G, Liquid Telecom is ensuring that its fibre backbone can meet the rising demand for high-bandwidth, video and internet services from businesses and consumers across the region,” said Nic Rudnick, Group CEO, Liquid Telecom. “Through continuous investment, the East Africa Fibre Ring is setting new network standards for the region.”
The award-winning East Africa Fibre Ring forms a key part of Liquid Telecom’s pan-African fibre network, which today stretches over 50,000km.
Completed in 2014, it links together Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania, with onwards connectivity to Liquid Telecom’s fibre networks in Burundi and eastern DRC. It also offers direct access to international subsea cables.
The East Africa Fibre Ring remains the first fully redundant regional fibre ring with multiple routing options ensuring that customers are not affected by fibre cuts and network outages. In the event of an incident, Internet traffic is automatically and instantly re-routed around the ring, giving consistently high speeds and continuous uptime for Liquid Telecom customers.
