Strive Masiyiwa’s Liquid Intelligent Technologies is putting more than R350m into a new service that will give enterprise customers the ability to control how much data they use, as well the speed at which they download.
After spending more than $1.5bn so far on network infrastructure, the group hopes to use its position as the first player to offer such a service in Africa to give it an edge and take up market share.
On Tuesday, the group’s Dataport unit said it would be spending $20m (R350m) on a new client-controlled network that can be scaled and customised to suit the needs of individual businesses.
The group said it is the first African company to launch “a pan-African software-defined network [SDN] service”. For customers, the biggest draw is the ability to control the amount of network capacity they need and use through an interface that was previously reserved for network providers.
The group is looking to leverage its telecoms assets across mobile, fibre, satellite, data centres and others to make this happen, while creating a new revenue stream for its infrastructure, which includes more than 100,000km of fibre.
“The cost of rolling out over three years is $20m. That’s the effort we’re committing and putting in to have a full-fledged platform with all the products that we’re currently offering on the 50 global POPs [points of presence] and 20,000 connected buildings in SA,” David Eurin, CEO of Liquid Dataport told Business Day at the AfricaCom telecoms conference in Cape Town.
SDN connections are typically used to connect enterprise networks — including branch offices and data centres — over local and long distances.
While Liquid claims a first from a pan-African perspective, rival Vodacom says it was one of the first telecom companies to launch such an offering in the SA market in 2018. Its parent, UK-based Vodafone, is also a proponent of the technology.
“If you look at the capex that Liquid has put into its network, it’s over $1.5bn. So we’re leveraging all this and adding a software layer to monetise that and expose the capabilities in better and more flexible ways,” said Eurin.
The offering is earmarked for SA, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, the UK and France in its first phase, with more countries and other points of presence expected.
Eurin says being the first and leveraging that position “is definitely going to be an advantage to the company because that makes us more customer-centric. We answer more needs for our customers and give them more control. Therefore, we expect to gain market share because we can now propose something that is attractive.”
Liquid is also taking this step because a number of operators in the US, Europe and Asia have succeeded with the offering. “We know how successful it’s been in other continents,” he said.
The company said users will have control over their operations through a web portal that will allow choosing of destinations, speed and bandwidths, managing traffic demand, checking costs and more.
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