Telecommunications group Liquid Telecom South Africa, part of pan-African Liquid Telecom, has unveiled a new network that offers customers near-unlimited bandwidth capacity.

A little over a year ago, the company embarked on a network overhaul, replacing the transmission, core and access structures, with the aim of eliminating legacy structures and responding to increasing bandwidth and reliability demands.

“The replacement of our core network has not only catered to legacy performance issues but also made Liquid Telecom’s network one of the most technologically advanced, modern and reliable networks in South Africa and across the African continent,” says Liquid Telecom South Africa CEO Reshaad Sha.

The network revamp included the replacement of ageing infrastructure across Liquid’s core and aggregation networks as part of plans to evolve and improve the customer experience.

The network now delivers a tenfold performance improvement over its previous capacity.

“The transition we wanted to undertake required . . . a significant shift. We could not just do an upgrade of this network, so we decided to replace the entire network,” he explains.

This comprised all the components of the active network, including the transmission layer, the core and the access layer.

The passive side of the network – the fibre and microwave layers – were not replaced.

The scalable and reliable core network replacement will provide customers with increased capacity and on-demand bandwidth to support the rapidly evolving needs of private- and public-sector organisations across South Africa.

“Using real-time self-service functionality, customers can now boost their bandwidth whenever needed – for a day, a week or a month,” Sha comments, adding that the platform allows Liquid to grow with its customer base as their requirements change and as they migrate more to the cloud.

“Liquid Telecom’s upgraded network is scalable, futureproof and reliable, helping businesses to accelerate cloud adoption, while also realising new opportunities,” he says.

The company is moving into the digital realm, using digital technologies to improve customer services within the network and taking a proactive approach to predictive services, says COO Craig van Rooyen.

“We are building a lot of over-the-top services. We are not only providing connectivity but also extending greater products and services,” he says.