US, Asia now connected through cross-Africa fibre route

Global telecommunications operators now have an alternative route for international network traffic thanks to a new fibre link that cuts straight through the centre of Africa.

Liquid Intelligent Technologies (formerly Liquid Telecom) said on Tuesday that it has completed a route that links the east and west coasts of the continent. The system runs from Mombasa on the coast of Kenya to Muanda on the coast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. (The DRC has a short, 37km coastline north of the Congo River.)

Dubbed by Liquid as a “new Asia-US global Internet transit route via Africa”, the system also serves “tens of millions of people in Africa’s landlocked cities, towns and villages”.

The new route, it said, avoids “high-risk bottlenecks in the Middle East and Europe”. Many cable systems that run through the Middle East are deployed in the Red Sea, where the risk of cable breakages from ships dropping anchor is high.

“The need for reliable connectivity between Asia and the US is booming,” said David Eurin, CEO for international wholesale services at Liquid Intelligent Technologies, in a statement. “Adding this corridor to our network will help organisations avoid the Red Sea and Europe routes as they have become bottlenecks for global Internet traffic.”

The introduction of this new route will allow global carriers and content providers to steer their traffic through Africa to other global points of presence at the lowest possible latencies (network roundtrip times), Liquid said.  – © 2021 NewsCentral Media