Econet has partnered with Alphabet, Google’s parent company to provide new high speed broadband technology which uses beams instead of fibre, Alphabet’s subsidiary, X “Moonshot Factory” said on Tuesday.
“Our ‘Project Taara’ high-speed optical wireless broadband endeavour is working with internet provider Econet and its subsidiaries to begin rolling out its tech across Sub-Saharan Africa,” X said in a statement.
“This deployment follows a series of small pilots in Kenya specifically, but now Taara and Econet are ready to start adding high-speed wireless optical links to supplement and enhance Econet service reach more broadly, starting with Liquid Telecom customers in Kenya.”
X added: “Taara is yet another approach to extending the reach of broadband networks to parts of the Earth that have typically not had access or high-speed connections, due primarily to infrastructure challenges.”
According to X, in a substitute of digging about two weeks to lay fibre cables, the new technology will be organized to connect two points 20 km apart and it currently delivers up to 10 Gbits of internet capacity.
X’s Taara is essentially a fibre optic network cable without the cable which uses a narrow, invisible beam of light to transmit data between two terminals that can span up to nearly 12.5 miles, while providing transfer speeds of up to 20 Gbps.
This, X said, means thousands of customers or households can be connected while still providing speeds high enough for streaming high-quality video.
“Taara’s technology can essentially be used to patch gaps in traditional fibre optic networks, spanning rivers or crossing terrain that would be hard or impossible to span using either under or aboveground cable.”
X has been piloting Taara in a number of deployments around the world and is moving towards commercialising the project.
-Newsday
