Liquid Telecom and Ekinops Receive Award for Innovation from Global Telecoms Business Magazine

Liquid Telecom and Ekinops Receive Award for Innovation from Global Telecoms Business Magazine

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Pioneering work completed by Liquid Telecom and its technology partner Ekinops (Euronext Paris: EKI) has been named "Best Fixed Network Innovation (TBC)" at this year's Global Telecoms Business (GTB) Innovation awards.

These prestigious awards, organized by the much-respected GTB magazine, celebrate the joint work of vendors and operators in innovative projects that better serve the telecom industry's end customers.

Liquid and Ekinops picked up the award for their joint work in building Africa's longest single span fiber links.

Liquid Telecom is the leading wholesale carrier in Africa. It has built Africa's largest fiber network, which runs from the north of Uganda to Cape Town. In total, its award-winning Pan-African fiber network spans more than 13,000 kilometers across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, DRC, Lesotho and South Africa. Liquid's fiber network is the first to cross country borders and covers Africa's fastest-growing economies where no fixed network has existed before.

Typical long-haul optical networks require an amplifier site every 100 kilometers in order to amplify the signal. In rural Africa, with its wide, open spaces where the distance between towns can be more than 400 kilometers, this is a major problem. The costs in building an amplifier site every 100 kilometers, including the power generator, site security, and roads to access the site are enormous.

Researchers at Liquid and Ekinops worked together to develop pioneering and innovative techniques for increasing the distance of fiber links. In December 2012 the first commercial link went live. At 310 kilometers, it is the longest fiber link in Africa and a vital part of the fiber which connects Harare to Victoria Falls via Hwange (around 585 kilometers). Since then another 10 long-distance links (more than 300 kilometers) have gone live - and more are planned.

Nic Rudnick, CEO of Liquid Telecom, said: "Congratulations to everyone who worked on this project which has set the standard for the industry. At Liquid we firmly believe that we are helping to create Africa's digital future by investing in technology which is why, unlike others, we choose to build and own our networks wherever possible."

"Ekinops technology allows carriers to deploy long-haul networks with ultra-long spans, and we are very proud to win the GTB award with Liquid Telecom for this project," said Jonathan Amir, Ekinops vice president of Sales in EMEA. "We estimate that Liquid has so far reduced the number of amplification sites from 16 to five, which translates into major cost savings on both CAPEX and OPEX."

About Ekinops

Ekinops is a leading supplier of next generation optical transport equipment for telecommunications service providers. The Ekinops 360 addresses Metro, Regional, and Long-Haul applications with a single, highly-integrated platform. Ekinops is a market-leading innovator in 100G transport with its unique all-in-1RU^® approach that truly optimizes optical networks.

The Ekinops 360 system relies on the highly-programmable Ekinops T-Chip^® (Transport-on-a-Chip) that enables fast, flexible and cost-effective delivery of new services for high-speed transport. Using the Ekinops 360 carrier-grade system, operators can simply increase capacity of their networks - CWDM, DWDM, Ethernet, ESCON, Fibre Channel, SONET/SDH, and uncompressed video (HD-SDI, SD-SDI, ASI).

Ekinops is headquartered in Lannion, France, and Ekinops Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary, is incorporated in the USA. For more information, visit Ekinops at www.ekinops.net.

About Liquid Telecom

Liquid Telecom supplies wholesale fibre optic, satellite and connectivity services in Africa. Its customers include Africa's largest mobile network operators, ISPs, financial institutions and businesses of all sizes in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa.

Liquid has built Africa's largest single fibre network which runs from the north of Uganda to Cape Town on a single thread. In total, its award-winning Pan-African fibre network spans over 13,000km across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, DRC, Lesotho and South Africa. It is the first fibre network to cross country borders and covers Africa's fastest-growing economies where no fixed network has existed before.

Liquid's wholesale network provides connectivity onto the five main subsea cable systems landing in Africa; WACS, EASSY, SEACOM, SAT3 and TEAMs.

Working under various brands, the Liquid Telecom Group has operating entities in Botswana, DRC, Kenya, Lesotho, Mauritius, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, UK, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Liquid Telecom Group is a subsidiary of the Econet Wireless Group.

In November 2012 Liquid was named Best African Wholesale Carrier at the annual telecoms industry awards of Capacity magazine.

Ekinops
Dominique Arestan, +33 (0)1 49 97 04 03
Marketing Communication Director
Mobile: +33 (0)6 42 10 95 05
darestan@ekinops.net

KEYWORDS: Europe France South Africa Africa

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