HARARE - Liquid Telecom (Liquid), part of the Econet Wireless Group, has announced an alternative route for the country’s high speed international traffic after concluding a direct connection of its fibre to the West African Cable System (Wacs) landing station near Cape Town in South Africa.

The telecoms company also announced the rolling out of an urban fibre network in Harare.

Wacs is high-capacity submarine telecommunications pipe that extends from South Africa to London along Africa’s west coast.

“In Zimbabwe, no other IAP has managed to achieve what Liquid Telecom has achieved in such a short space of time. Most operators have opted to wait for us to construct the network and then use it for their backhaul purposes. Liquid Telecom now has a blueprint to deploy urban fibre in other countries,” Liquid managing director Wellington Makamure said.

Liquid Telecom has built the largest fibre network in southern Africa providing backhaul between most urban areas and last mile connectivity in the main cities of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho and South Africa.

The company’s network is the first to cross country borders and covers some of the most challenging parts of the world where no fixed network has existed before. It operates as a wholesale carrier in all five countries as well as an operator in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Liquid has built the largest fibre network in Zimbabwe providing broadband voice and data in all the major cities and towns.
 It is an IAP as well as an Internet service provider in Zimbabwe and as such provides services for residential, SMEs, large enterprise customers as well as other providers in Zimbabwe.

Liquid has also assisted Econet Wireless, the country’s largest cellular provider, in alleviating congestion on the backhaul network and enabling high speed 3G data.

Liquid Telecom is already providing connectivity onto the other three main subsea fibre systems of Africa; Eassy, Seacom and Sat3.

The company has also started building the first urban network in Zimbabwe which is providing bandwidth speeds of up to 20 mbps in a number of urban centres.

Liquid Telecom will be investing heavily in expanding into new countries to ensure that for the first time all countries and operators in central and southern Africa are directly connected. — Business Writer/ITnews