Setumo Mohapi

Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions has become the second company, after Vodacom, to sign an agreement with Liquid Telecom South Africa for the procurement of wholesale 5G services.

TechCentral reported in December that Vodacom had signed an agreement to use Liquid’s planned wholesale 5G network, which it is building using its legacy allocation of spectrum at 3.5GHz, a radio frequency spectrum band identified as a key one for 5G technology. That partnership was non-exclusive, opening the way for other companies to lease capacity from Liquid.

Liquid will provide wholesale 5G connectivity to Internet Solutions to allow it to serve enterprise customers.

“Local businesses are adopting technologies like software-define wide-area networking, the Internet of things and cloud computing. However, these technologies need network connectivity that provides high-quality, increased capacity and greater reliability to ensure optimum performance,” said Liquid Telecom South Africa CEO Reshaad Sha in a statement announcing the deal on Friday.

Internet Solutions managing executive Setumo Mohapi said his company “has evolved its networking model to provide a high-performance hybrid network that aggregates multiple wide-area network transport services. This enables clients to fully utilise all available bandwidth for high availability and total application performance. The innovation, flexibility and range of 5G use cases that this offers for different industries such as agriculture, retail, manufacturing and logistics is boundless.

“5G is a core component of our hybrid network and we are extremely excited about the extended capability this partnership with Liquid enables us to offer our clients,” Mohapi said. — © 2020 NewsCentral Media