INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cabling
Paratus bridges the West coast
and the East coast of Africa
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A
route that would normally take more than 60 hours to drive
in a car can now be done in about 31 milliseconds on the
new Paratus Africa fibre network that stretches from the West
coast to the East coast of Africa.
The Trans-Kalahari Fiber (TKF) network extends 4,160 kilometres
from the West Africa Cable System (WACS) cable landing station
in Swakopmund to the EASSY cable landing station in Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania.
The route is under one single Autonomous System Number (ASN), a
feat that has been eluding most African operators. The fibre network
interconnects with selected operators in various countries en-route
to ensure reliability in the overall management of the fibre network
across the continent.
of the capital used for this project through Namibia was funded by
Nimbus Infrastructure.
“This is a huge milestone and a massive achievement,” added
Erasmus. “We can now deliver WACS capacity to land-locked
countries in which we have operational branches including Botswana
and Zambia.”
Operators on both the east and west coast of Africa are dependent
on undersea cable access and when outages occur, are mostly reliant
on alternative cables on the same side of the continent.
Erasmus says the new route will allow operators to think differently
about their requirements for diverse routes within and around the
African continent.
“Nimbus Infrastructure is a Paratus Africa strategic partner and a
significant shareholder in Paratus Namibia,” he said. “Paratus Africa will continue to extend fibre routes with own
infrastructure builds in order to maintain uptime, reliability and
scalability to its clients, should there be any degradation in service
levels,” he said. “We believe that the fibre optic network provides
high-quality reliability and scalability with high access speeds to
contend with the demand on bandwidth.
Paratus started with construction of the cable route from Windhoek
to Swakopmund in 2017 and at the end of April 2018, completed
the second-phase route from Windhoek to the Botswana border. Part “We certainly want to take advantage of the countless opportunities
in Africa and we’re therefore engaging other land-locked nations to
leverage our fibre backbone and WACS capacity.” n
Paratus Group COO Schalk Erasmus says the project is part of
Paratus Africa’s aggressive infrastructure expansion strategy with
Nimbus Infrastructure.
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