Liquid Telecom Zimbabwe has started upgrading its network by rolling out fiber optic network in the southern and eastern parts of the country to meet the growing demand for internet services.
Liquid Telecom Zimbabwe Managing Director Wellington Makamure, said that the project, which will cost about $14 million covering 1,600 kilometers, will extend main trunk backbone network to connect over all the 10 provinces.
“This main trunk backbone will facilitate back-hauling of all telecommunication services from these areas to the rest of the world,” said Makamure.
Liquid Telecom has built Africa’s largest independent fiber network, which runs from the north of Uganda to Cape Town in South Africa covering Africa’s fastest-growing economies, where no fixed network has ever existed before. The network currently spans over 40,000 kilometers across borders, the East Africa Fiber Ring and the first regional fiber ring on the continent inclusive.
Over the past few years, Liquid Telecom has been leading in terms of investing in telecommunications infrastructure across Africa and they have been buying small ISPs across africa, the latest being Neotel in South Africa.
Africa is the last continent with available IPv4 addresses, but it seems this year the IPv4 number will run out. Yet the uptake of the new IPv6 addresses is proving so slow in Africa. Last year, Liquid Telecom began the rolling out of IPv6 in two of its 12 countries it services across Africa that is Kenya and Zimbabwe. The roll out has more than doubled the use of IPv6 across the continent.
As IPv4 addresses run out, it will become progressively difficult and more costly for networks to add new devices and users to their networks, as well as prompting additional Internet security issues.
The company so far operates in Botswana, DRC, Kenya, Lesotho, Mauritius, Rwanda, South Africa,Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and the UK under a number of different wholesale, enterprise and retail brands.
