Pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom, a subsidiary of Econet Global, has established a point of presence (PoP) at Interxion’s data centre in Marseille, enhancing its global network by offering direct access to mainland Europe for the first time.
The new PoP will enable Liquid Telecom to offer its customers improved latency and redundancy to Europe, reducing roundtrip delays from Africa by up to 20 milliseconds.
Interxion’s MRS1 data centre in Marseilles has emerged as a major connectivity hub for Europe since it opened in 2014. It offers direct access to 13 major international subsea cables, including SEACOM, I-ME-WE and SEA-ME-WE4, providing Liquid Telecom with onwards connectivity to its Global PoPs in London, Mombasa and Fujairah.
MRS1 provides direct access to the France-IX, NL-ix and DE-CIX internet exchanges, providing new peering opportunities for Liquid Telecom.
“We are pleased to establish a PoP at one of Europe’s largest interconnection hubs,” said Ben Roberts, Group CTIO at Liquid Telecom. “This latest addition to our global network will help support traffic from our carrier and enterprise customers to Europe, delivering a richer content experience for end users and improving access to cloud and content services.”
Earlier this year, Liquid Telecom also established a new PoP at Teraco’s CT1 data centre in Cape Town, where it is now able to offer MPLS, IP transit and peering services. The PoP provides direct access to subsea cables running along Africa’s west coast, such as the West Africa Cable System (WACS), South Atlantic 3 (SAT-3) and African Coast Europe (ACE), which connect to Liquid Telecom’s terrestrial network across southern Africa.
Liquid Telecom plans to add further redundancy to its global network over the coming months by launching an additional PoP in London, as well as establishing its first PoP in Portugal.
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Through a joint venture with Botswana Power Corporation, which was established in October 2016, Liquid Telecom also plans to establish three more PoPs in Botswana soon. Liquid Telecom currently operates a total of 31 Global PoPs across Africa, the Middle East and Europe. This includes locations in Botswana, DRC, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, as well as PoPs in the UK, France and the UAE.
