Kenyan telco giant, Safaricom, has selected Wireless Transport Solutions provider, Aviat Networks to facilitate a 5G backhaul with its WTM 4800 multi-band radio platform.

This will enable Safaricom to roll out 5G networks in rural areas and other remote locations in Kenya where fiber and copper cable sites are not feasible.

Aviat’s role in the partnership will be to provide Safaricom with the spectrum equipment. This equipment focuses narrow beams that can deliver upto 10GBps over long distances. While this coverage will still be inadequate for the most part, Aviat says that their multiband radio platform will cut costs.

According to Aviat, this WTM 4800 multi-band network deployment is the industry’s only cloud-based multi-band link design solution allowing microwave planners to see a combined, integrated view of availability and capacity for the complete multi-band link.

The company said in a statement, “Microwave spectrum cost is one of the largest TCO (total cost of ownership) elements in many countries around the world, and as capacity demands grow with 5G, more spectrum is required. Aviat multi-band provides the lowest TCO for 5G backhaul, especially in countries, like Kenya, where the cost of microwave spectrum is high.”

Aviat’s equipment will be useful to lower Safaricom’s spectrum costs, and to offload traffic between the expensive microwave spectrum onto the less expensive E-band without compromising reliability.

Company CEO, Pete Smith expressed that the pace of 5G rollouts was increasing, and that the firm was determined to leverage their capabilities to help their customers deploy the lowest TCO backhaul possible.

This announcement comes quick on the heels of Google and Telkom’s Loon Internet Baloons’ deployment in Baringo, Kenya. This makes Kenya one of the first countries to have a Loon base station in Africa.

The base stations provide more extensive internet coverage than cell towers. As such, the service is set to promote digital inclusivity of people in rural areas.

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Google has today announced that it will be rolling out a dedicated MfMeet tab on Gmail for Android and iOS users to meet the growing demands for video conferencing services.

The Google Meet tab will be first rolled out on iOS and will be widely available over the next two weeks. And will be rolled out to Android soon. The “Meet” tab once made available, will show a “My Meetings” list of all upcoming scheduled calls. Upon tapping any meet.google.com URL from that view, in an email, or third-party app, you’ll be taken to a new preview screen that provides basic details like the length and who is in the call.

This screen will note what account you’re “Joining as” and check your video feed before joining. The Meet experience in Gmail will replace the standalone Google Meet app when opening a link, though the client will remain available and get some tweaks.

There will be a big blue “New meeting” button above that will let you get a meeting link to share, start an instant meeting, or schedule in Google Calendar. Additionally, there will also be an option to quickly Join with a code.

Google also confirms that “G Suite for Education accounts that are not able to create Meet video meetings will not see the Meet tab.” Those users are asked to use the dedicated Meet for Android/iOS client.

Google recognizes that some people might not like a bottom bar taking up their screen, so there will be the ability to disable,” If you don’t want to have meet appear as a tab in the Gmail app, you can disable it through the accessing the settings on the hamburger menu in the top left corner of your inbox. Tap on your account, scroll down and uncheck meet”.

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Data centre operator Teraco has today added cloud infrastructure provider Routed and VMware Cloud Verified partner, as a local cloud provider to join the African Cloud Exchange (ACX).

Teraco’s African Cloud Exchange provides secure, direct, flexible network connections to a wide range of local and global cloud service providers.

Andrew Cruise, Managing Director, Routed, says the company is also the only African provider of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) within VMware’s vSphere 7 client software, and that bringing the VMware cloud platform to ACX is another key milestone.

“Multi-cloud strategies are growing in adoption as they mitigate service disruption and also reduce vendor lock-in. Routed, as a member of ACX, strengthens the ecosystem and will undoubtedly help in driving businesses to the cloud, which is one of the fastest-growing segments of IT spend,” he adds.

ACX will accommodate any cloud provider’s API: ultimately, we want to make it easy for the providers and clients to sell their products. By simply logging onto a portal, ACX enables provisioning of network circuits to any cloud provider, immediately reducing the administrative headaches of getting people connected,” he added.

Andrew Owens, Manager of Interconnection & Peering at Teraco, says the premise of ACX is to assist in the local drive towards the cloud, but in a secure and correct way: “While there was no time pressure for businesses to adopt a cloud methodology, it is rapidly evolving, and the cloud is becoming a vital tool for any business wanting to succeed. ACX is a technology-neutral and growing ecosystem, and we are excited to welcome a local cloud provider such as Routed and its VMware platform.”

ACX was developed to fully integrate with all cloud providers, adopting a modular, template-driven approach and will accommodate any cloud provider’s API. Ultimately, we want to make it easy for providers and clients to sell their products. By simply logging onto a portal, ACX enables provisioning of network circuits to any cloud provider, immediately reducing the administrative headaches of getting people connected,” added Owens.

Routed offers a VMWare cloud platform for clients seeking access to multiple cloud environments adding to its four years of 100% uptime and notable market share within the ISP sector.

“The inclusion of Routed in the Africa Cloud Exchange is a great example of collaboration in the cloud market,” said Dave Funnell, senior cloud provider manager at VMware Sub-Saharan Africa.

“The benefit to customers is the availability of a fully verified VMware Private Cloud, delivered from a secure multi-tenanted platform with all the benefits expected from a cloud solution.

“Its location is also a major drawcard, with direct network connectivity to the public hyper-scale clouds in the leading data centre provider in Africa,” added Funnell.

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