Nairobi — LIQUID Telecom Kenya and Nokia have announced a two-year partnership to upgrade their existing fibre network, which is anticipated to ensure faster and more reliable connection along the route from the Indian Ocean to data centres in East Africa.
Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and neighboring countries are set to benefit.
The partnership between Liquid Telecom and Nokia support Optical Transport Network/ Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (OTN/DWDM) technology with an initial network capacity of 500G.
The network will support high-capacity connections from the submarine landing stations in Mombasa, Kenya, to major datacenters 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 fiber route to submarine for other landlocked countries such as Ethiopia, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo.
"We believe that every individual on the African continent has the right to be connected," said Ben Roberts, Chief Technology Officer at Liquid Telecom.
"This is the vision that has been driving our network expansion across Africa," Roberts added.
The partnership 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.
Daniel Jaeger, head of the Central, East and West Africa Market Unit at Nokia, said the network would be an important, additional backbone network across Africa.
The deployment began in October 2018, and is expected to provide enhanced services to thousands of corporate customers and fibre to the home (FTTH) users, and has the potential to reach over 85 million mobile subscribers across Kenya and its neighboring countries.
