At Advanced TV, journalist Chris Forrester has posted that Liquid Telecom, which started life as the satellite service operator Econet Satellite Services, is to invest some $400 million (Rand 8 billion) into Egypt and its infrastructure and data centers.

The investment is being made into Telecom Egypt, and was announced at a signing ceremony in Sharm el-Sheikhn at the Africa 2018 Forum.

Liquid Telecom is part of the Econet parent company.

Journalist
Chris Forrester.

Telecom Egypt says it will use the network to connect Egyptian businesses to the rest of Africa, whilst also partnering with Liquid Telecom to build data centers across Egypt. Following an initial investment of $50 million in data centres and cloud services, Liquid Telecom plans to invest an additional $350 million in broadband and financial inclusion initiatives, as well as high capacity data centres. These will be similar to some of the best-in-class data centres in South Africa.

Liquid Telecom’s expanding network is almost 70,000 km. in length and is linked to more than 600 towns and cities in 13 countries across Africa, and includes Econet’s ‘Cape to Cairo’ fiber backbone.