Technology firm Liquid Intelligent Technologies has launched two new fully redundant terrestrial fibre optic routes, Kenya to Ethiopia and Zambia to Malawi, in a development that is set to allow for greater efficiency and reliable regional link.
Spanning over 1,000 kilometres, the fibre link between Kenya and Ethiopia offers businesses in the latter access to data centres and cloud in Nairobi ensuring that it does not leave the continent.
This link is further supported by the cross-border 711 kilometre-link between Zambia and Malawi, providing a direct connection to content caches and data centres situated in South Africa.
“Kenyan and Ethiopian businesses are rapidly adopting digital technologies, and this new link will enable trade and investment between these two great nations in our region,” said Liquid Rest of Africa CEO Adil El Youssefi.
“For Liquid Kenya, we see this growing demand being catalysed by the Kenya Kwanza Government’s digital superhighway initiative, and this 1000 km of newly lit fibre is our first contribution to the private sector investment into this flagship project”.
In partnership with the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company (Ketraco) and Ethiopia Electric Power (EEP), Liquid’s new link connects Nairobi and Mega, a town in southern Ethiopia, and provides a capacity of four terabytes per second.
Complementing the existing terrestrial routes across this border, Liquid says, the Kenya-Ethiopia route will now have carrier-grade connectivity, which serves to rapidly expand data traffic on this crucial route.
Other firms that have laid backbone fibre highways on the Kenyan soil include Seacom, which started delivery of the subsea cable connecting Kenya and South Africa in 2019, as well as the East African Marine Systems (TEAMS) whose 5,500-kilometre subsea cable connects Mombasa to Fujairah in the United Arabs Emirates (UAE).
Last year, President William Ruto announced a State-backed five-year plan to lay an extra 100,000 kilometres of the national fibre optic cable, with the ICT Cabinet Secretary (CS) later clarifying that the government would undertake 52 percent of the project and leave the rest to the private sector.
