Liquid Intelligent Technologies looks to expand its fiber network infrastructure and has contracted Nokia as its partner of choice. The project is a 12Tbps fiber backbone link that will be spanning 7 African countries that include Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
As part of the agreement, Nokia is deploying 145 nodes of 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) in the seven countries with a total design capacity up to 12 Terabits per second. Once launched, the new, advanced optical transport backbone will enable Liquid lntelligent Technologies to address the growing demand for capacity and deliver submarine traffic to landlocked countries at an affordable cost.
Nokia
Liquid lntelligent Technologies’ new optical backbone covers the sites with a colourless and flexgrid ROADM network for improved agility and flexibility. The Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) feature of the new optical transport network will help reduce network disruptions by enabling automatic rerouting to alternate paths as needed.
Nokia is known by most as a consumer device manufacturer whose rise came about through its various feature phone and smartphone releases. However, Nokia is also a very big player in the Telecoms space and one of the preferred partners for commercial telecommunications infrastructure in Europe and America.
They have contributed to the development of new backbone fiber network technologies that Liquid Intelligent Technologies wishes to use to improve its network resilience in the event of a node in the network experiencing an outage.
This state-of-the-art fiber backbone link will primarily be providing capacity for the various data centers that Liquid Intelligent Technologies has across the continent. It should help with better performance of the various cloud services, managed services, and hosting services they offer and set them up for improved capacity to expand their client base. There is no word yet on whether or not this will improve internet performance on Liquid Home’s FibroniX and WibroniX services.
Currently, Liquid Intelligent Technologies has the largest fiber network in Africa at over 100,000km of fiber laid with Broadband and Cloud Services Group (BCS) coming in second with over 80,000km laid so far. That said, they are gunning for Liquid’s title with their numerous fiber expansion projects currently underway including a 2000km fiber rail project in Zimbabwe.
