Telco Safaricom has announced the deployment of a 400G network link at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain. The launch makes it among the first carriers in the globe to commercially deploy the solution to the masses.
The 400G link will make Safaricom’s network more robust as its customers continue to consume more video content. The carrier says that the rollout of the solution was promoted by demand for higher video quality for mobile and home fibre customers.
Folks who have invested in smart home devices, or are planning to do so should be happy to learn that 400G will hone the operation of those appliances alongside the carrier’s home fibre plans. At the moment, Home Fibre’s most expensive plan (40 Mbps) has the capability to support smart home/IoT devices. Effectively, it is a fair assumption that the entire Home Fibre network will see notable improvements in the coming days too.
“The 400G solution will support the continued growth of our network which is being driven by an explosion in internet usage. Mobile data usage on our network has been doubling year-on-year while our fibre network now reaches more than 220,000 homes and 17,000 businesses across more than ten towns. It was therefore prudent to invest in the latest network technology to ensure that we can support the demand from our customers for years to come,” said Thibaud Rerolle, Chief Technology Officer, Safaricom.
The link’s infrastructural part will be supported by Huawei and will grow the telco’s capacity to carry internet traffic in over 500 km fourfold. It will also achieve theoretical speeds of up to 400 Gigabits per second (from 100 Gigabits per second).
The telco has laid more than 5,500 km of fibre in more than 16 major Kenyan towns to accommodate its growing network coverage.
The 400G standard was approved back in December 2017 by the Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
