Page 7 - EngineerIt May 2021

IN CONVERSATION

Liquid Intelligent Technologies

A giant rising in Africa

By Hans van de Groenendaal

iquid Telecom was established in 2004 with an aspiration to become a multinational
telecom business across the African continent. In 2009 the company put its first fibre
Lin the ground and today, 12 years later, the company is operating across 15 countries
and has the largest independent fibre network on the continent spanning over 73 000 km.
The network is highly protected, self-healing and with a switched backbone that prioritises
traffic in Africa with reduced latency.
Recently Liquid Telecom changed its name to Liquid Intelligent Technologies. Why the
name change? During an online conversation I posed this question to the newly appointed
South African CEO, Deon Geyser.
He said: “If you look at the company today you will find that beyond connectivity, we
offer a host of other services including cloud, security, artificial intelligence, network and
data centre services. Our new name better represents all the new developments and
products we have implemented over the past few years.

The Cape to Cairo journey
It may not be a high-speed rail service or road infrastructure but the Cape to Cairo fibre Deon Geyser
journey by Liquid Telecom is testament to their aspiration of having the largest large
fibre backbone across the eastern and inland parts of Africa, providing connectivity for African data centres
landlocked countries and connections to the world. While part of the group, Deon Geyser
“It speaks to our commitment to interconnect and connect Africa. Besides inland fibre, explained that the company is keeping its
crossing boundaries and large river systems, we also have sub-sea capacity across the west data centre business separate from Liquid
and east coast of Africa. We are a consortium member in SAT3/SAFE, WACS, TEAMS and Intelligent Technologies and will continue
EASSy, as well as a large IRU inventory holder in SEACOM and a shareholder in WIOCC. trading as Africa Data Centres. The
We have onward connectivity to major international hubs such as London and Marseille. company currently has three data centres
In March this year we provided the landing and interconnect facilities for the METISS in South Africa, one in Samrand which
sub-sea cable that connects South Africa with the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius, is a recent acquisition of the traditional
Reunion and Madagascar.The 365 km cable terminates in a manhole in Amanzimtoti and is Standard Bank data centre, and a large
managed in our nearby cable station from where our fibre connects the cable to the Teraco data centre investment in Cape Town. The
Durban data centre and onwards on our, and other fibre networks”. Standard Bank transaction was completed
There is a huge requirement for inland fibre. While the sub-sea assets have at the end of last year.
fundamentally changed the way in which the internet is being connected to Africa, there “During lockdown it was great to see
are many landlocked countries that need to take the data traffic on fibre to connect to the the amount of investment happening
internet somewhere. “There are also satellite systems in our network that are providing at our Liquid and ADC campus,
significant redundancy capacity in the event of a cable break. We have indeed built the building additional data centre capacity.
Cape to Cairo telecommunication gateway envisioned when the company was founded and Companies are looking for data centre
are proud of our achievements”. resilience in the country and we can
In South Africa, Liquid Intelligent Technologies is also playing a major role in connecting offer that. Being carrier neutral, in
cities and towns on the east coast of South Africa. “We have recently inaugurated fibre addition to the large capacity liquid fibre
routes touching Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth), East London, George and towns in the Transkei, connections, any carrier can terminate in
connecting them with undersea cables in Durban and Cape Town”. our data centres. This is one of the main
reasons why we are keeping ADC as a
Working from home challenge separate entity”.
“If you think about the whole progress, whether working from home, working from anywhere,
there is much talk in the market about decentralisation where people, who are based in Cloud is taking off
metropolitan areas but working from home, are taking the opportunity to move to coastal “Offering cloud was a natural extension of
towns and rural areas. They however still need high speed internet services and data our pervasive fibre network. Over the past
services, and this is placing new demands on fibre connections. Customers expect the year our cloud business grew almost five
same level of service as when they worked from home in the big cities. We are able to times. We are seeing more and more that
meets many of these demands!” the requirements are not only from large

EngineerIT | May 2021 | 5