African businesses and consumers will now be able to benefit from a direct connection to the USA as Liquid Intelligent Technologies opens an Internet Point of Presence in Miami, connecting to the Liquid network via a South Atlantic subsea cable.
As part of Liquid’s East-West route between the US and Asia via Africa, the new POP is connected to their 100,000km of fibre across 11 countries on the continent and another 14 countries via the Operators Alliance Programme and Liquid Satellite Services. This results in customers being able to leverage a better connection to the US, giving them access to Cloud services, OTT resources, Internet content and high-quality voice and video calls with family and business partners.
Speaking about the impact, David Eurin, Chief Executive Officer, Liquid Sea, said: “The new POP in Miami will enable US-based operators, businesses, OTT, Cloud service providers and CDN operators to access 40 data centres across Africa, including nine data centres operated by Africa Data Centres and six operated by Teraco. We will be able to interconnect with all our partners in the USA and provide a direct connection to US Internet resources to our Africa customers.”
Liquid will connect to Miami via Fortaleza in Brazil and Luanda in Angola via the South Atlantic SACS and MONET subsea cables. The POP will be hosted at the Equinix data centre in Miami. To guarantee the best level of service, Liquid will peer at Equinix Miami Internet Exchange (MI3 in Boca Raton) with access to 116 potential peers, including most of the largest US companies. Liquid can already provide access to all data centres and millions of destinations in North America through its partnership with ZAYO.
Notably, an important destination to African business customers and consumers, connecting Africa to the USA enables more opportunities for global trade and encourages cooperation, as indicated by the growing interest from companies in North America to invest in Africa. A significant part of Liquid’s IP transit traffic is routing towards the USA.
This significant connection comes off the back of the recent announcements of a $300 million loan by USA-based DFC and a new equity investment of approximately US$90 million by the IFC into Liquid’s data centre capacity expansion in Africa through Africa Data Centres. Liquid has also introduced its partnership with Facebook to build a fibre network in the Democratic Republic of Congo that is expected to improve internet access for more than 30 million people and help meet the growing demand for regional connectivity across Central Africa.
With the Miami POP and new direct link across the South Atlantic, latency is expected to fall by 100ms to 163ms. Currently, Cape Town to Miami is sitting at 263ms via Europe. Video calls with family and business partners will be faster and of better quality thanks to a direct, lower latency route.
