PARIS, July 2, 2013 — Liquid Telecom, the leading wholesale carrier in Africa, has chosen Ekinops, a leading supplier of next generation optical transport equipment, for its new long-haul DWDM network across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia. The network features the longest uninterrupted fiber spans in the continent.
Liquid’s new optical network spans more than 2,500 km and was built to accommodate the growing demand for bandwidth in the region as well as the need for an ultra-long-haul transmission network. This expansion of Liquid’s Pan-African network will help bring the Internet to areas starving for reliable, high-speed access.
The new network carries multiple 10G wavelengths and can scale to support many more 10G and 100G services.
Liquid Telecom has built Africa’s largest fiber network, which runs from the north of Uganda to Cape Town. In total, its award-winning Pan-African fiber network spans more than 13,000 km across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, DRC, Lesotho, and South Africa. Liquid’s fiber network is the first to cross country borders and covers Africa’s fastest-growing economies, where no fixed network has existed before.
Liquid Telecom and Ekinops have been awarded at this year’s Global Telecoms Business Innovation awards the “Best Fixed Network Innovation” for their joint work in this project for building Africa’s longest single span fiber links. They have successfully deployed spans that cover more than 310 km without inline amplifiers.
Typical long-haul optical networks require an amplifier site every 100 km in order to amplify the signal. In rural Africa, with its wide open spaces, where the distance between towns can be more than 400 km, this is a major challenge. The costs of building an amplifier site every 100 km – including the power generator, site security, and roads to access the site – are enormous.
This was the main challenge for Liquid Telecom and one of the key reasons it chose Ekinops, a company that specialize in long spans thanks to its DynaFEC® dynamic forward error correction technology.
With normal spans, the network would have required 16 amplification sites but thanks to the long spans, Liquid Telecom was able to reduce the number of spans to five.
Nic Rudnick, CEO of Liquid Telecom, said, “Congratulations to everyone who worked on this project, which has set the standard for the industry. We choose to build and own our fiber networks in Africa wherever possible, and we trust Ekinops to help us cross the massive distances found in this continent.”
“Liquid Telecom is the leading wholesale provider in Africa,” said Jonathan Amir, Ekinops’ vice president of sales in EMEA. “With our long haul technology we helped Liquid expand their optical network cost-effectively and overcome geographical challenges. Their network will enable millions of new people to connect to the Internet and we are very proud they chose us as their partner.”
About Liquid Telecom
Liquid Telecom supplies wholesale fibre optic, satellite and connectivity services in Africa. Its customers include Africa’s largest mobile network operators, ISPs, financial institutions and businesses of all sizes in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa. Liquid has built Africa’s largest single fibre network which runs from the north of Uganda to Cape Town on a single thread. In total, its award-winning Pan-African fibre network spans over 13,000 km across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, DRC, Lesotho and South Africa. It is the first fibre network to cross country borders and covers Africa’s fastest-growing economies where no fixed network has existed before. Liquid’s wholesale network provides connectivity onto the five main subsea cable systems landing in Africa; WACS, EASSY, SEACOM, SAT3 and TEAMs. Working under various brands, the Liquid Telecom Group has operating entities in Botswana, DRC, Kenya, Lesotho, Mauritius, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, UK, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Liquid Telecom Group is a subsidiary of the Econet Wireless Group.
About Ekinops
Ekinops is a leading supplier of next generation optical transport equipment for telecommunications service providers. The Ekinops 360 addresses Metro, Regional, and Long-Haul applications with a single, highly-integrated platform. Ekinops is a market-leading innovator in 100G transport with its unique all-in-1RU® approach that truly optimizes optical networks. The Ekinops 360 system relies on the highly-programmable Ekinops T-Chip® (Transport-on-a-Chip) that enables fast, flexible and cost-effective delivery of new services for high-speed transport. Using the Ekinops 360 carrier-grade system, operators can simply increase capacity of their networks – CWDM, DWDM, Ethernet, ESCON, Fibre Channel, SONET/SDH, and uncompressed video (HD-SDI, SD-SDI, ASI). Ekinops is headquartered in Lannion, France, and Ekinops Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary, is incorporated in the USA. For more information, visit Ekinops at www.ekinops.net.
PR Archives: Latest, By Company, By Date