A flurry of recent news from Airtel Africa has seen the telecom giant establish a fibre-focused subsidiary and announce infrastructure expansion collaborations as well as counting down to an imminent data entre launch.
Airtel Africa Telesonic was announced last week as the name of the subsidiary that will manage the company’s fibre assets. It aims to harness ground fibre assets and submarine cable networks to address Africa’s growing need for wholesale data by providing full terrestrial fibre and submarine cable solutions.
It isn’t starting from scratch, of course. Telesonic kicks off with a network of over 75,000 kilometres of terrestrial fibre across Airtel Africa’s 14 markets aiming, as a representative put it, to provide cutting-edge fibre-optic solutions that will empower businesses, education, healthcare, and communities at large. Apart from managing Airtel’s extensive fibre network across the continent, Telesonic has also invested in the 2Africa submarine cable system.
African fibre markets are certainly getting interesting. As ITWeb Africa points out, this area has also attracted Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Vodacom Group, MTN Group and Bayobab.
Meanwhile, as we announced last week, Airtel Africa is entering into an infrastructure expansion collaboration with IHS Towers.
In addition Airtel is concluding plans to break ground on a Lagos-based data centre in March through the data centre business known as Nxtra. In India Nxtra says it offers the largest network of secure, scalable and sustainable data centres in the country to leading enterprises, hyperscalers, start-ups, SMEs and governments.
We announced the launch in Africa of Nxtra by Airtel last December.
Source: https://developingtelecoms.com/telecom-technology/optical-fixed-networks/16200-airtel-underlines-its-african-expansion-ambitions.html