Thursday, March 28, 2019

Liquid Telecom picks Nokia for optical transport in East Africa

Liquid Telecom Kenya, part of the leading pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom, selected to upgrade their existing fiber network to support OTN/DWDM technology with an initial network capacity of 500G.

The deployment will use the Nokia 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS). The solution will initially be available on the following routes:

Nairobi - Mombasa: high-capacity interconnections from Nairobi datacenters to the submarine landing stations at Mombasa
Nairobi - Kampala: opens a new high-capacity route to Uganda, Rwanda and beyond
Nairobi - Namanga: opens a new high-capacity route to Tanzania
Nairobi - Ethiopia: opens a new high-capacity route to Ethiopia and gives the landlocked country an alternate route to the submarine connection in Djibouti

Ben Roberts, CTO, Liquid Telecom, said: "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 neighboring countries.