Liquid Telecom Kenya, part of the pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom, and Nokia have announced a two-year partnership to upgrade their existing fibre network to support OTN/DWDM technology with an initial network capacity of 500G.
According to a press statement, the partnership will result in a faster and more reliable connection along the route from the Indian Ocean to datacentres in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and other neighbouring countries.
The new system will be powered by the Nokia 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS). The upgrade will allows Liquid Telecom to meet the growing demand from its carrier, mobile operator and internet service provider (CSP/ISP) customers for higher-capacity inter-networking services.
The network will also support high-capacity connections from the submarine landing stations in Mombasa, Kenya, to major datacentres in Nairobi, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, as well as surrounding markets.
Liquid Telecom will become the first communications solutions provider to connect through their own network with nearly every country that borders Kenya whilst also providing an alternate fibre route to submarine for other landlocked countries such as Ethiopia, Rwanda and DR-Congo.
Ben Roberts, the Chief Executive officer at Liquid Telecom, said for them to remain relevant on the market, their clients need to be offered quality Internet services.
“We believe that every individual on the African continent has the right to be connected. This is the vision that has been driving our network expansion across Africa. By teaming up with Nokia, we have been able to quickly adapt to the industry’s rapid growth within the region and greater access to our high-speed fibre network and cloud services across East Africa. This comes at a time when more mobile operators are planning to increase their backbone bandwidth as they prepare for 5G which is driving the demand for high speed city to city internet links.”
The deployment began in October 2018, and is expected to provide enhanced services to thousands of corporate customers and FTTH users, and has the potential to reach over 85 million mobile subscribers across Kenya and its neighbouring countries.
Daniel Jaeger, head of the Central, East and West Africa Market Unit at Nokia, said: “As an industry-leading optical network provider, Nokia has enabled customers to maximize network capacity and efficiency while supporting the deployment of mission-critical services. With our DWDM/OTN network, Liquid Telecom can offer the high capacity and low latency needed for its customers, ensuring an excellent customer experience and ultimately connecting all of Africa to the digital world. This network will be an important, additional backbone network with Nokia technology across Africa.” He explained
Liquid Telecom selected Nokia’s DWDM and OTN technologies offer an increased capacity and bandwidth, and the ability to support long distances. The Nokia solution allows Liquid Telecom to reuse its existing Nokia DWDM infrastructure, which reduces its capital expenditures.
The Nokia and Liquid telecom solution will initially be available on the following routes: Nairobi - Mombasa: high-capacity interconnections from Nairobi datacentres to the submarine landing stations at Mombasa. Nairobi - Kampala: opens a new high-capacity route to Uganda, Rwanda and beyond
Other routes include Nairobi - Namanga: opens a new high-capacity route to Tanzania then Nairobi - Ethiopia: opens a new high-capacity route to Ethiopia and gives the landlocked country an alternate route to the submarine connection in Djibouti
BY SAMUEL NABWIISO
