Liquid Telecom-owned Infocom recently unveiled a major upgrade of its international Internet gateway in Kampala to provide 16 times more international Internet capacity.
One of the major upgrades is the installation of Core Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing system designed for long-haul and ultra long-haul optical networking applications. This has increased the company’s Internet capacity 16-fold from 10Gig 160Gig.
According to Duncan Namuhani, the network manager at the company, the aim is to connect far more Ugandans to cheaper and more reliable internet. In order to achieve this, the company has also implemented a major upgrade of its international gateway data center.
The company’s Kampala data centre is also now hosting a UNICEF gaming server for coding for social benefit, since many developers better themselves or begin with coding for games., with no capacity limit to support online games all over Africa. “We provided the hardware and the online link and gave the server unlimited capacity/bandwidth. The hardware alone costs over $20,000. This is in line with our long term plan of being a Pan African force for change and development, offering solutions to the continent,” said Mr. Namuhani.
The new router will position Infocom and other local Internet suppliers to expand their network to meet growing bandwidth demand.
Liquid Telecom is the only Internet supplier in Uganda with connections to all of the region’s five submarine cables: Seacom, Teams, Wacs, Eassy and Sat3.
Liquid Telecom, which last year acquired one of Uganda’s longest serving and best respected internet service providers, Infocom, is the only internet company with its own fibre ring drawing on all five undersea cables entering East Africa, and linking Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania in thousands of kilometers of fibre optic cabling.
Just recently, the firm unveiled a UGX2bn investment programme in its internet infrastructure across Uganda, including the tripling of its Points of Presence (PoPs), the upgrading of its data centre, and the connection of a series of Ugandan rural towns to its fibre internet backbone.