Liquid Dataport, a business of pan-African tech group Liquid Intelligent Technologies (Liquid), has launched its newest fibre route connecting Mombasa to Muanda which lies on the west coast of DRC.
Through a presser, the company noted that this is the shortest route connecting East to West Africa, reducing data transmission latency by 20 milliseconds.
“The much anticipated 3,800km route marks a new era in East-West connectivity on the continent, adding to Liquid’s One Africa Digital Network, which now spans 110,000 km,” the company said.
The fibre route passes through Uganda and Rwanda, aiming to add more reliable and affordable broadband connectivity to over 40 million people living and working in all the major cities along the route.
The latest route complements Liquid’s earlier achievement in 2019, linking Dar es Salaam to Muanda via Zambia.
Liquid’s president and group CEO Hardy Pemhiwa said the new East-West route will enable its customers to take advantage of capacities ranging from 1Mbps to 100,000Mbps.
“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,” he said.
“This East-West route which compliments 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.”
It will also enable cloud supplier redundancy with access to multiple data centres and cable landing stations, ensuring maximum uptime.
This is hugely beneficial to the many businesses in East, Central & Southern Africa that are embarking on their digital transformation journey.
There is, however, a need to have stable, reliable connectivity with low latency and access to numerous digital tools to optimise businesses.
Through this, African enterprises can expand continentally and compete with their global counterparts.
Liquid Dataport CEO David Eurin said the availability of this latest route brings many proven economic and social benefits.
These include providing access to online educational resources to create more jobs and driving the adoption of new technologies.
“We have a significant number of wholesale, enterprise and hyperscale customers along this route, and we fully support them in operating their global networks,” Eurin added.
The Mombasa-Muanda route aims to help global organisations looking for internet resiliency avoid the Red Sea and Europe routes which have become bottlenecks for global internet traffic.
It will also seek to provide faster fibre connectivity to landlocked countries on the African continent, creating significant attractiveness for growing connectivity hubs in Kenya and DRC.