Grace Ashiru
Businesses across the Continent increasingly use digital tools, directly increasing the need for connectivity.
Cassava Technologies is a pan-African technology company. Today, one of its businesses, Liquid Dataport, revealed that it had launched the first terrestrial fiber link between Mombasa and Johannesburg.
This new route, which includes a first-of-its-kind fiber link across the DRC between Goma and Kananga, gives several landlocked countries more redundancy, resilience, and connections to many data centers and cloud resources. Most importantly, it gives these countries a backup plan if the subsea cable between Kenya and South Africa goes down.
Cassava Technologies wants to ensure that everyone in the African region can access the internet. Liquid Dataport’s milestone achievement shows we are still committed to a digitally connected future where no African is left behind. We will do this by continuing to spend on improving and growing our digital infrastructure.
Hardy Pemhiwa, President and Group CEO of Cassava Technologies says, “This route will not only give more people access to high-speed Internet, but it will also improve lives and make it possible for businesses to create and keep millions of jobs.”
The growing use of digital tools by businesses across the Continent is a direct cause of the exponential growth in demand for connectivity. Because of this, service providers and foreign carriers like Liquid Dataport need to meet this growing demand as quickly as possible.
This route, which will join South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is another sign that Liquid Dataport is committed to giving everyone in Africa much better access to digital services.
David Eurin, CEO of Liquid Dataport, said this about the opening of this new route: “This is the first terrestrial-only connection connecting Mombasa to Johannesburg via DRC. It’s the result of our big investments in fiber infrastructure in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, the DRC, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, among other places.
With this new route, we can give our current and future users access to a smart network that is more reliable and takes less time. It is not only a backup, but it was also made to give landlocked countries on the road direct access to cloud resources on the African Continent and beyond.
This route lets hyperscalers, enterprises, and wholesale carriers link directly to data centers in Johannesburg and Nairobi. With investments in the Equiano sea cable and a lot of capacity on the PEACE and 2Africa undersea fiber cables, as well as an extensive terrestrial cross-border fiber broadband network, Liquid’s customers can get low-cost international capacity landing on both the Kenyan and South African shores, wherever they need it on the Continent.
