Liquid Intelligent Technologies has established a new Internet point-of-presence (POP) in Miami, enabling a direct connection to the US and connecting to the Liquid network through a South Atlantic subsea cable.

Forming part of Liquid’s East-West route between the US and Asia, through Africa, the new POP is connected to the company’s 100 000 km fibre network across 11 countries on the continent and another 14 countries through the operators alliance programme and Liquid Satellite Services.

This will enable customers to leverage a better connection to the US and provide access to cloud services, over-the-top (OTT) resources, Internet content and high-quality voice and video calls with family and business partners.

“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,” says Liquid Sea CEO David Eurin.

Liquid will be able to interconnect with all its US partners and provide a direct connection to US Internet resources to its customers across Africa, enabling more opportunities for global trade and encouraging cooperation, as indicated by the growing interest from companies in North America to invest in Africa.

“With the Miami POP and new direct link across the South Atlantic, latency is expected to fall by 100 ms to 163 ms. Currently, Cape Town to Miami is sitting at 263 ms through Europe. Video calls with family and business partners will be faster and of better quality thanks to a direct, lower latency route.”

Liquid will connect to Miami through Fortaleza, in Brazil, and Luanda, in Angola, through the South Atlantic SACS and Monet subsea cables, peering at the 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.”

The new connection follows a $300-million loan from US-based Development Finance Corporation and a new equity investment of about $90-million from the International Finance Corporation 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, which is expected to improve Internet access for more than 30-million people and help meet the growing demand for regional connectivity across Central Africa.