FEATURE CONNECTING AFRICA’S POTENTIAL
METRE BY METRE, COUNTRY BY COUNTRY BY GLENN MAULE
I
n the early 1900s, the Ugandan Railway was built, connecting Mombasa to Lake Victoria, and facilitating trade within the region. This milestone in East African history connected its many regions not only to each other but to the world and opened many economic opportunities. So much opportunity that this railway led to the founding of Kenya’s now greatest city, Nairobi, which was originally established in 1899 as a railway depot specifically for the Uganda-Kenya railway. As always, great progress always comes with great risk. The construction of this railway was fraught with danger with incurable diseases, dangerous terrain, and hostile wildlife proving a mighty obstacle to the line’s construction. Even so, the line was built, and the region thrived. Fast forward 120 years and you will find these same transport corridors still in use today, not just as a channel for rail transport, but for the fibre connectivity infrastructure that connects Africa to the world. But is that enough? Africa is ready to grow exponentially, however, without sufficient connectivity infrastructure in place (not to mention
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other key infrastructure, e.g., clean water, stable electricity supply, etc.), hope for growth is fruitless as millions of Africans remain economically disconnected from each other, and the world. Right now, there is no shortage of internet capacity landing on this continent’s shores. The subsea cables are many and continue to bring in more bandwidth. Over the next two years, the continent will see 400 Terabits of capacity brought in from new undersea cables, but without a suitable framework for inland connectivity that potential remains sorely untapped. International capacity of this magnitude is going to need a terrestrial backbone provide ubiquitous Internet access, unlocking economic potential across the continent. This is what drives Liquid Dataport, and we are succeeding, in this most important endeavour. At Liquid, we have built critical fibre corridors across the continent. This is Africa’s largest independent fibre network, offering connectivity to all the main subsea cable systems that link the continent to the rest of the world.
