A presentation by Liquid Zimbabwe MD, Wellington Makamure, at the Broadband Forum 2014 in Harare http://broadband.techzim.co.zw

1. Building Africa’sdigital future
ZIMBABWE’S BROADBAND
INFRASTRUCTURE: focus from supply to
consumption
.

2. Connectivity: widening focus from
supply to consumption
• Overview : Liquid Telecom
• Undersea Capacity in Africa
• Internet Capacity in Zimbabwe
• Zimbabwe’s Connectedness (The consumption factor)
• Fibre Project
• FTTH
• IP Backhaul project
• Keeping Local Traffic Local
• Peering In Africa
• Challenges and Issues

3. Overview: Liquid Telecom
• Started Operations in Zimbabwe 2009/2010
• Launched high speed fibre linking Zimbabwe to South Africa and the rest
of the world in 2010
• Launched high speed fibre linking Zambia to Zimbabwe in 2011
• More than 8000 km of fibre currently live running traffic
• Further construction projects underway
• Services include IP transit, National backhaul, International and National
• MPLS, International high speed Ethernet and legacy STM-X SDH
connections
• Acquired Zimbabwe Online (ZOL) in 2012
• Launched DWDM in 2013
• Started rolling out Fibre to the home through GPON in 2012

4. 2001
SAT3
Undersea Capacity Growth In Africa Since 2001

5. 2009
Seacom
TEAMs

6. 2012
ACE

7. 2013
SAex, ACE, TEAMs, Seacom, WACS, EASSY, SAT
3

8. Fibre Capacity 2001

9. Fibre Capacity 2012

10. Fibre Capacity 2013

11. International (Fibre) Capacity Supply
Growth In Zimbabwe (Since 2009) Gb/s
Before 2009
2009 (PTEL)
No Fibre Capacity
Satellite only
150M (Via Botswana)
2010 (LTZ, AFR)
2.6G
2011 (ALL)
2012 (LTZ Expansion)
2013 (LTZ DWDM)
2014 (LTZ
DWDM??)
6G
20G
50G
100G??

12. Liquid Telecom Zimbabwe
International Capacity Growth
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
International Capacity graph in Gbps
Undersea capacity Zimbabwe --> South Africa

13. Measuring Zimbabwe’s
ConnectednessFacts and Figures
• ITU estimates that only 16% of Africa is online (by end of 2013)
• Fewer than 10% of fixed broadband subscriptions offer speeds of at least 2Mb/s
Year 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Average (in
Africa)
Fixed Telephone Subscriptions per 100
Inhabitants 2.72 2.99 2.90 2.66 2.20 2.34 6*
Percentage of Individuals using Internet 11.40 11.36 11.50 15.70 17.09 ** 16
Mobile Cellular Subscriptions per 100
iinhabitants 12.94 30.96 58.88 68.87 91.91 103 63

14. WHAT NEXT?
• We still need to extend optic fibre trunk routes
 This is why we are trenching everyday (4km/day)
• We need more local content
 Bandwidth without consumption is meaningless
 Next area of focus for Liquid Telecom
• We need ways to pay for services online
 Convenience
 Also improves local content
 Opportunity for local service providers
• We need Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)

15. What Next?
• We need more access Network Coverage
• And this needs a variety of technologies to achieve
LTE
 Fibre to the Home (FTTH), GPON, WiMax
• We need data centres
 Reliable power
 Reliable connectivity
• We need content
 Partnership between Network providers and
content providers

16. Enhancing Zimbabwe’s Connectedness
Fibre Project
• Provides a very high capacity optic fibre
network using state of the art technology
• High availability assured through the use
of the ring and mesh topologies
• It’s mostly a construction project meant
to build Africa’s digital future and bridge
connectivity gap for landlocked nations.
• Also provides international connectivity to
the rest of the world through undersea
cables namely SEACOM, EASSY, WACS,
SAT3 and TEAMS

17. Fibre Quality
• Buried Ducted fibre 1m deep and OPGW on HV Power lines
• Nodes have High Availability Power Systems
• Next Generation SDH and DWDM
• High speeds on all routes
• Ring protection
• Backed up with NOC, and field engineering
• Metro rings in the cities
• SLA cannot be matched within the region
• Fibre to the Premises in business and residential districts

18. Enhancing Zimbabwe’s Connectedness
FTTH
• Extending fibre connectivity to residential areas
• Uses latest GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) technology
which allows bandwidth of up to 50Mbps per home
• Future proof
• The GPON network has now passed in excess of 7000 homes
• Trenching is ongoing at an average rate of 4km per day.
• By the end of project, Harare (and other Zimbabwe cities) will be
among the most connected city in the World.

19. Enhancing Zimbabwe’s Connectedness:
IP Backhaul for Mobile Operators
• World internet usage set to increase to 3 billion users
• The number of mobile-broadband subscriptions now 2.3 billion
• 55% of this in Developing countries
• However, backhaul is the biggest challenge for MNOs
• Bandwidth hungry applications and fast speed access
networks wont mean much without a complete and unified end
to end simplified backhaul infrastructure.
• Liquid Telecom has built a mobile backhaul solution that
smoothly overcomes the challenges of legacy 2G/3G backhaul
infrastructure.
• The design has a ring architecture for high availability and a
core of 100Gigabits per second to cater for varying mobile
operator needs (Liquid is the first in Africa to achieve this
speed)

20. Enhancing Zimbabwe’s Connectedness:
Liquid Telecom In Africa
• Building one Network across multiple bordering countries
• Licenced in 11 African countries
• Crossing borders
• Open to JVs and partnerships
• A “Carrier’s Carrier”
• Servicing the needs of all different types of operators
• Diverse products to support enterprise, home user, rural
broadband
• Africa’s Largest International Terrestrial Fibre Network

21. AFRICA FIBRE FOOTPRINT

22. Liquid Telecom Internet
traffic Breakdown (Mb/s)
695.37
6.79
762
3018
Only 0.15% of all Liquid Telecom traffic is exchanged at
ZINX (NB: Most of the traffic is not local to local)

23. Keep Local Traffic Local
• Of the top 50 “Zimbabwean” websites, only 10 are hosted in Zimbabwe.
• We are using undersea capacity to access the following;
 techzim.co.zw
 newsday.co.zw
 newzimbabwe.com
 Dailynews.co.zw
 ….And many others
• This has a significant bearing on the price per megabyte of internet
bandwidth. Bulk capacity is international hence the high cost.
• ITU estimates that residential fixed broadband costs in developing
countries amount to 30% of average income! This can come down as we
improve local to local content.

24. Keep Local Traffic Local!
• We need data centres
 Reliable power
 Reliable connectivity
• We need content: Build partnerships between network
providers and content providers
• We need to gradually move to the cloud!
• Cloud computing is a way of delivering and using IT services
“on demand” and in a manner in which the services are
flexible, scalable and cost effective. Allows users to access
and store information and use software functionality on
remote servers owned/operated by third parties as and when
they are needed

25. Opportunities in the Cloud
• Zimbabwe was ranked as the second most “cloud
ready” country in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2011
 (The study/analysis was for 11 African countries:
http://theafricanfile.com/ict/the-cloud-and-africa-
indicators-for-growth-of-cloud-computing)
 Some of the factors considered were:
Broadband Penetration
Ease of Doing Business (The more difficult it is
to do business, the more people will be forced
onto the cloud)
Literacy Rate

26. Enhancing Zimbabwe’s Cloud
Readiness
• Cloud Service Delivery via Private (MPLS) Links
 Secure
 Predictable Performance (SLA)
 Suitable for both Public or Private cloud solutions

27. Local Content: The African
Perspective
• We love peering!
• Present at more African IXPs than any other operator (arguably)
• JINX and KIXP are the most significant in terms of traffic exchange
• Liquid Telecom also present at LINX which has members from more
African countries than any other European IXP
• South Africa (JINX) and Kenya(KIXP) are regional Hubs
• London is a strategic hub for Africa as a lot of African Sub Sea cables
end up there
• Also peering with other global carriers and content providers is
possible in these locations
• We are also present at ZINX, BINX, ZIXP, UIXP, RINEX but traffic to
these is not so significant.
• We support IXPs and participate in them actively

28. “Local” Content In Africa
• For our case we see that a sizeable percentage of total (“Local” –African)
traffic from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia is for South Africa
• Mostly South Africa News and TV, Internet banking, email/commerce
• Hardly any traffic at all between other neighbours say Zimbabwe and
Zambia or Zimbabwe and Botswana
• Like Zimbabwe, Pan African interest sites (e.g. Big Brother Africa; Iroko TV)
are usually hosted in USA or Europe

29. Challenges
• Clarity of telecommunications and ICT policy
• Regulatory conditions to allow growth
• Co-ordination and cooperation with government departments
and parastatals
• Roads, Power, Local govt policy, Customs and Excise
(borders)
• Co-ordination and cooperation between operators
• Construction projects
• Unique Zimbabwean challenges
 Lack of trust
 Most players shun win/win agreements

30. Questions