The route is the shortest path connecting East to West Africa, reducing latency by 20 milliseconds. The 3,800km route adds to Liquid’s One Africa Digital Network, which now spans 110,000km in length.
“The real challenge today is closing the access-usage gap in Africa so that more Africans can use the internet technologies available to them, now and in the future," said Hardy Pemhiwa, president & group chief executive officer of Liquid Intelligent Technologies.
"This East-West route which complements our existing Pan Africa fibre network, is significant because it is helping to solve that problem – it not only brings global traffic to the continent but also improves the cost economics of Africa’s broadband Internet access.”
The fibre route connects Kenya and DRC, via Uganda and Rwanda and delivering broadband connectivity to over 40 million people living and working in all the major cities along the route. The latest route complements Liquid’s 2019 route linking Dar Es Salaam to Muanda on the West Coast of DR Congo via Zambia.
In addition, the new East-West route enables Liquid’s customers to access capacities ranging from 1Mbps to 100,000Mbps. It also enables cloud supplier redundancy with access to multiple data centres and cable landing stations, for maximum uptime.
“We have a significant number of wholesale, enterprise and hyperscale customers along this route, and we fully support them in operating their global networks," said David Eurin, chief executive officer of Liquid Dataport.
"The availability of our latest and shortest East to West route brings many proven economic and social benefits - from providing access to online educational resources to creating more jobs and driving the adoption of new technologies.”
The Mombasa-Muanda route will help global organisations looking for Internet resiliency avoid the Red Sea and Europe routes which have become bottlenecks for global internet traffic, and will provide faster fibre connectivity to landlocked countries on the African continent.
