Liquid Telecom plans to build new undersea cable from Africa to Middle East
In a statement today, Liquid Telecom has announced that their company subsidiary Liquid Sea will start the construction of an undersea cable that will connect Africa to the Middle East and then on to Europe, running for 10000km from South Africa along Africa’s coastal countries to the Middle East.
The cable will interconnect to Liquid’s already existing terrestrial network to allow access to its fibre internet access by landlocked countries too in the Eastern, Central and Southern Africa with speeds of up to 20-30Tbps which is more than ten times what the current submarine networks offer.
Liquid Telecom Group CEO Nick Rudnick said, “The Liquid Sea project reaffirms our commitment to building Africa’s digital future and removing any bottlenecks in providing the fastest and most reliable access to the Internet to every single African on the continent. The impact of Liquid Sea will be a far more reliable and ultra-fast connection for governments, businesses, schools and homes in both coastal and land-locked countries across Africa”
He also added that Requests for Tenders have been sent out to companies that deal in submarine cable construction.
The statement also mentioned that the new cable connection expected to be complete in 2 years will connect landing ports that have no access to the existing subsea fibre network.
David Eurin, Liquid Telecom’s Group Chief Strategy Officer said “This project will provide a step-change in the way Internet connectivity is regarded in Africa. We will be able to leverage the new submarine cable and our terrestrial network to improve our offerings to carriers, enterprise customers and households throughout the continent. It is of utmost importance to us to create equal opportunities to people living both in coastal and landlocked countries, the latter being too often forgotten in large international projects of this kind.”
2 years may seem like a long time, and those speeds seem to good to be true, but we hope that the time will fly and we will be liberated from the slightly-below-2mbps speeds that most Zambian ISPs provide on their networks. We also expect more terrestrial networks to have been established by then so that this new connection has a much wider reach than it would have today.
