Leading telecoms giant, Liquid Telecom Zimbabwe on Friday last week gave its corporate customers an unforgettable digital experience after walking them through its state of the art Network Operations Center (NOC) as part of the company’s celebrations of Customer Service Week.
Guests had a chance to tour the Liquid NOC, a network infrastructure built using cutting edge equipment and technologies to support Zimbabwe’s high robust fiber optic ring and fault tolerant network.
Elias Chimbera – Liquid Telecom Zim’s NOC Manager going through network topologies and demonstrating the overall Enterprise network setup to the corporate clients during the Customer Service Week.
Under the live beaming of High Definition digital screens, Liquid Telecom Zim NOC Manager, Elias Chimbera demonstrated Liquid Telecom Zim’s core network setup showing advanced topologies with designs of the Internet Service Provider’s wide area network (WAN), positioning of default gateways and their backup routes.
Chimbera also demonstrated the routes traversed by local traffic generated in Zimbabwe before they reach gateways and routed into international servers. The live presentations also showed how the operator’s distribution network will switch data from the end user networks (Customer Edge) using packet-based data switching technologies like Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON).
The logical topologies also showed the distribution of bandwidth at various levels of operation where Chimbera said Liquid Telecom Zim has over the years managed to build a resilient and fault tolerant enterprise network through building backup routes around the country’s major cities.
The Liquid NOC is live 24/7 with a team of network technicians interchanging shifts to ensure that customers have an all round support throughout the year. The Network Operations Center works within regulated time of delivering technical support to its corporate clients through a fast track ticketing system.
Liquid Telecom’s clients posing Questions to the NOC Manager during a live interaction session
In the case that faults arise, the NOC team will issue fault tickets to an always standby field operations team which has field engineers scattered around the country. The NOC team is also supported by a vibrant service delivery team which is responsible for liaising with clients and issuing work orders.
In comparison with all the other ISPs in Zimbabwe, Liquid Telecom is by far the most advanced operator in terms of infrastructure setup as demonstrated by the complexity of its Network Operations Center. The ISP’s 40Gbps capacity also puts Liquid Telecom ahead of any other player in Zimbabwe.
Speaking to the guests during a luncheon at Meikles Hotel soon after the NOC tour, Liquid Telecom’s Chief Commercial Officer – Martin Mushambadope said, ” At Liquid Telecom our, clients come first. We love and respect the business partnership that we have with our local corporate clients and therefore our team continue to hold on to its mandate of delivering excellent service to you”
The Liquid Telecom Zim Chief Commercial Officer – Martin Mushambadope (in the middle) flanked by his lieutenants: Lancelot Mabhugu (far right) – National Account Manager and Lorreta Songola (far left) – Head of Business Development
“Just to give you a brief background since we started operations here in Zimbabwe seven years ago, Liquid Telecom Zim has deployed a record 17 000km of fiber around the country with the Liquid Telecom Group in Africa owning a total 50 000km fiber optic infrastructure.” said Mushambadope.
Mr Mushambadope went on to say that Liquid Telecom has now moved past just connecting people and companies but is now focusing on leading Africa’s digital transformation. ” As some of you might be aware of, Liquid Telecom is now the only Microsoft Certified Partner in Zimbabwe, responsible for delivering products like Microsoft Office 365, SQL Database Management, Azure etc. which are all being delivered via Liquid Telecom’s fiber optic powered cloud computing services” continued Martin Mushambadope.
He went on to say that after successfully managing to lay such a robust network infrastructure, we are now focusing on digitizing it so that we give more value to our African businesses. Mushambadope closed his speech by assuring clients that their vision is to make sure that everyone lives a fully connected life by 2020.
Like their motto: Our recent tour of Liquid Telecom’s NOC clearly tells an ambitious story that the operator is in total control of Building Africa’s Digital Future.
The Battle For Relevance Continues…!!
By Cisco Eng. & Technology Analyst – Shingie Lev Muringi
Email: shingie@263chat.com Cell: 0775 380 652
