Kenya’s Safaricom launches high-speed backbone network
Safaricom, which is 35% owned by Vodacom, has announced that it will use Huawei’s 400G backbone network
Kenya’s largest telecommunications operator Safaricom has become the first company in the world to commercially deploy the next-generation backbone network to cater for rising data traffic. A backbone is a high-speed link that interconnects different networks and facilitates the exchange of data between them. “It is the underlying elements that connect all the big data centres in our network. That connectivity needs to serve a growing demand. That is why we need to increase the capacity we can serve,” Safaricom chief technology officer Thibaud Rerolle said on Wednesday. The deployment of the backbone network — that will achieve speeds of 400GB per second, compared to the previous 100GB — is in response to the growing number of broadband users as well as mobile- and fixed-network traffic in the east African country. On Wednesday, on the sidelines of World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Safaricom, which is 35% owned by Vodacom, announced that it has selected Huawei’s 400G backbone netw...
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