Pan-African telecommunications company Paratus has completed a new terrestrial crossing between Johannesburg and Mozambique.

The group lit up a 750 km route from Maputo, through Eswatini, to one of Paratus’ international colocation centres, Teraco Isando DC.

“This week, we were able to commence with link testing and the first live traffic traversed the link. Prior to activating this shorter route, the majority of traffic to Maputo would need to go through Mtinzini on either the Seacom or Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSY) cable systems,” explained Paratus Group chief technical officer Rolf Mendelsohn.

“Latency is halved from 18 ms to 9 ms. For this route we decided to deploy the latest Infinera coherent technology, operating at 100 GB wavelengths.”

This comes after months of meticulous planning and significant delays owing to the global Covid-19 pandemic.

Paratus Group CEO Barney Harmse said that the project shows the company’s commitment to invest in Africa, which it continues to do under strenuous economic circumstances.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has placed tremendous pressure on various economies and we simply cannot allow this to stand in the way of development of Africa as a whole. There are no limits to growing our footprint in Africa and we are proud of what the team has achieved,” he said.

In August 2019, Paratus was the first operator to connect a route from the East Coast to the West Coast of Africa.

The 4 160 km route stretched from the West Africa Cable System landing station in Swakopmund, Namibia, to the EASSY cable landing station in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, under the  management of Paratus’ single autonomous system number.

“The recent launch of our second data center in Luanda, Angola, speaks to the investment alluded to by Harmse. The group is thinking big with its various infrastructure projects running simultaneously across all countries of operation and we are excited about the investment prospects in Africa,” Mendelsohn concluded.