News
What is Liquid Telecom upto after buying Rwandatel?
Posted Saturday, October 19 2013 at 15:57
In Summary
- Liquid Telecom’s operation in Rwanda is the bringing together of the business of the ISP it acquired when it bought KDN (Altech) and the former incumbent Rwandatel.
In June, Liquid Telecom took over former Rwandatel, absorbing all of its assets except its property.
The company is headed by former Rwandan communications minister Sam Nkusi.
In infrastructure terms, the company Liquid Telecom bought has a 500-kilometre fibre network throughout what is by African standards a relatively small country and has a GPON network in Kigali.
Says Mr Nkusi: "We will be offering 10 gbps as a minimum along all of that network.”
Frustrated by its efforts to get the former incumbent to become the vehicle for national development, the Rwandan government turned to the Koreans and asked in KTT to develop a new national fibre backbone that now covers all of the district centres and goes along the country’s main roads.
When complete, it will be 2,500km; most of it is now built and will soon be operational. In addition, MTN also has its own fibre network across the country, notably linking to its operation in Uganda and on to the landing station at Mombasa.
With all this activity, Mr Nkusi says: “The infrastructure element’s been solved. The bandwidth’s been solved.” But he says there are two outstanding issues:” The last mile and affordability.”
The government network is currently managed by government-owned BSC but soon the company will be sold to KTT and it will build an LTE network to complement the fibre network. This will mean that the fibre can then be connected to the towns and villages that lie off the main roads.
Like Kenya’s proposed LTE network, it will be a wholesale network that will be shared by all of the country’s three mobile operators: MTN, Airtel and Tigo.
It has fibre connections to Kenya (via Uganda) and to Tanzania and before long it will also connect to Tanzania through Burundi on a separate route.
Liquid Telecom’s operation in Rwanda is the bringing together of the business of the ISP it acquired when it bought KDN (Altech) and the former incumbent Rwandatel.
It is a mixed bag of almost every technology that has been tried over the past 10 years. There are plain old copper fixed lines (12,000 subscribers), CDMA, 16D and 16E WiMAX and ADSL.
As Nkusi observes: “The only thing we don’t have is GSM. But we will be leveraging all our technologies to fill the gaps we have. For example, there is no fibre in Butare.”