Liquid Telecom has selected Ekinops for its new DWDM network across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia.
The wholesale carrier’s optical network covers more than 2,500 km. The new network is designed to address the growing demand for bandwidth in the African region as well as the need for an ultra-long-haul transmission network.
Liquid’s Pan-African network carries multiple 10G wavelengths and can scale to support many more 10G and 100G services.
Liquid Telecom’s fiber network, which runs from the north of Uganda to Cape Town, is the first to cross country borders and covers Africa’s fastest-growing economies, where no fixed network has existed before.
Nic Rudnick, CEO of Liquid Telecom, said, “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 and Ekinops have 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 cost of building an amplifier site every 100 km — including the power generator, site security, and roads to access the site — is enormous. With normal spans, the network would have required 16 amplification sites. The long spans enabled Liquid Telecom to reduce the number of spans to 5.
Jonathan Amir, Ekinops’ vice president of sales in EMEA, said. “With our long haul technology we helped Liquid expand their optical network cost-effectively and overcome geographical challenges.”
Recently, Liquid Telecom selected the SaaS version of Telarix’s iXTools platform and B2B exchange service iXLink to automate the management of its international voice traffic operation. Telarix’s iXTools SaaS enables Liquid Telecom to reduce costs and increase profitability across their interconnect networks.
