• Liquid Dataport has launched a new underground fibre cable network that connects Johannesburg with East Africa.
• The company built the cable network in the hopes of providing a new backup for the undersea cables that run across the western coast of the continent.
• It spans around 4 000KM and connects South Africa, Kenya, the DRC, Zambia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe.

A brand new underground fibre cable has been brought online by Liquid Dataport, and it connects Mombasa (Kenya) to Johannesburg (South Africa), spanning around 4 000km. The terrestrial cable also links to cities in between countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Zambia.

Liquid, which is owned by Cassava Technologies, hopes the new route will provide multiple landlocked countries in the region with extra redundancy, resilience, connectivity to numerous data centres and cloud resources, and, most significantly, an alternative option in the event of a subsea cable outage between Kenya and South Africa.

In 2020, South Africans dealt with a slowdown in internet speeds as the West Africa Cable System (WACS) snapped under the ocean. The system connects South Africa and other African nations to Europe via the UK. At that time, service providers had to reroute internet traffic between the regions through cable routes in East Africa.

“This route will not only bring increased access to high-speed connectivity but will also improve lives and allow businesses to create and sustain millions of jobs,” says Hardy Pemhiwa, president and Group CEO of Cassava Technologies, in a press release sent to Hypertext.

“This is the first terrestrial-only cable connecting Mombasa to Johannesburg via DRC. It is the result of our significant fibre infrastructure investments in several countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, DRC, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa,” explained David Eurin, CEO of Liquid Dataport.

“It not only provides redundancy but was designed to provide additional capacity to the landlocked countries on the route with direct access to cloud resources on the African continent and beyond,” he added.

This route connects South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and the DRC and offers hyperscalers, enterprises and wholesale carriers direct connectivity to data centres in Johannesburg and Nairobi.

[Image – Photo by Compare Fibre on Unsplash]