Africa’s Liquid Telecom has tapped Ekinops for DWDM transport gear to power its backbone across South Afria, Zimbabe, and Zambia. The deployment covers some 2,500km of terrestrial fiber and includes some of the longest uninterrupted fiber spans on the continent.
Liquid Telecom has been assembling a Pan-African fiber network on the eastern side of the African continent stretching from Uganda to South Africa. Of course, that’s not continent-wide yet, but it’s a solid start.
But putting it together is posing challenges not found elsewhere, including the need for greater spacing between inline amplification sites. Much of the needed infrastructure – e.g. power, roads, and security – simply isn’t available between network nodes and building it all from scratch would be too costly.
The Ekinops gear and its DynaFEC has helped them stretch the distance between ILAs out from the usual 100km to as many as 310km, and reduced what would have needed 16 amplification sites to just 5. That sort of improvement will surely help in extending Liquid’s fiber to other parts of the continent.
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Categories: Fiber Networks · Internet Backbones
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