Just days after the firm announced a $34 billion investment in Rwanda to extend its cable network, data, voice and IP provider in eastern, central and southern Africa, Liquid Telecom has announced a UGX 2 bn of investment in its Ugandan subsidiary Infocom.
According to the firm, the funds will be used to extend its fibre cable infrastructure across Kampala’s Central Business District and to multiple rural towns across Uganda, including Mukono, Jinja, Masaka, and Mbarara.
In a statement, Hans Haerdtle CEO, Liquid Telecom Uganda said, “Fibre represents a completely superior quality of internet, in line with the advanced Internet offering from Infocom. Utilising Africa’s largest cable network to reach rural towns in Uganda, and to offer a world class service within Kampala’s CBD, is in line with our vision of fuelling the country’s accelerated economic growth,” said Mr Hans Haerdtle, Liquid Telecom’s Chief Technical Officer East Africa and CEO of Infocom.
Liquid Telecom has increased the number of Points of Presence (PoPs) for its top performance business-focused internet from 11, a year ago, to now 30, and upgraded all its existing PoPs becoming the first ISP to built a regional fibre ring –The East Africa Fibre Ring – and back up international links connecting East Africa to each other and the rest of the world.
Liquid Telecom’s POPs in Uganda now have a capacity ranging from 1 to 10 Gigabytes per second, 10 times faster than its competitors.
“We are setting up Metro towns in order to give these towns a network connection that will see their businesses access the kind of speed, reliability and affordability of internet that users are getting in the capital Kampala. E-business and governance are taking shape and therefore we need to incorporate the whole population into this frontier in order to realize balanced development,” said Mr Haerdtle.
In Rwanda, the main connection links into Tanzania through Liquid Telecom Namanga route and then back to Kenya, connecting to the submarine cables in Mombasa, creating East Africa’s first terrestrial optical fibre ring. This ring gives the firm a back up alternative for customers to stay connected even in the event of a fibre cut, as traffic is automatically rerouted in the opposite direction.
Liquid Telecom’s fibre ring is connected to all five submarine cable systems-Seacom, Teams, Wacs, Eassy and Sat3 cables, the other four are on standby and act as a backup.
Recently, the firm installed a Ksh 400 Million fibre network to Kenya Agricultural & Livestock Research Organization to help improve researchers and farmers access to information.