Summary

  • A 6 August disclosure says Taara helped Liquid Intelligent Technologies distribute nearly a dozen wireless optical links across Lagos over the previous two years.
  • The links run from Liquid points of presence at Africa Data Centres and other Lagos data centres to enterprises around and outside the city, including classes such as ISPs, banks, hotels and a utility.
  • Taara rates Lightbridge at 20 Gbps full duplex over 400 metres to 20 kilometres, but no route-level speed, distance or utilization has been published for Lagos.
  • Liquid says a link can often be installed and activated within hours; Taara’s product documentation says installation can take less than a day.
  • The stated network roles are reaching sites without fibre and complementing fibre where cable cuts cause outages, not replacing the underlying fibre network.
  • Liquid is exploring opportunities in Abuja, Ibadan and Kano, but no committed sites, timetable, capital budget or construction is disclosed for those cities.

The relevant scale is small, specific and operational

“Nearly a dozen” is neither a laboratory trial nor a metropolitan network map. It is a modest deployed layer that can still matter if each link closes an expensive access gap. According to the current specialist report, the links were distributed over two years from Liquid points of presence at Africa Data Centres and other Lagos data centres to large enterprise locations around and beyond the city.

The endpoint classes—local ISPs, banks, hotels and a utility—suggest several operating patterns, but the customers are not named. Some links may be primary access, some backup and some temporary extensions; the disclosure does not say. It also does not provide exact count, coordinates, path lengths or which data-centre facility supports which endpoint. The value is therefore in the disclosed architecture, not in an invented footprint.

Wireless optics compresses the civil-works clock

Lightbridge sends data through a line-of-sight optical beam rather than through a newly trenched cable. Taara says a terminal can be mounted on a pole, tower or rooftop and installed in less than a day. Liquid’s acting Nigeria chief says links can often be installed and activated within hours. For a customer near network capacity but separated from it by road, property or permitting constraints, that can move delivery from a construction schedule to a site-alignment task.

Fast installation is not the same as instant service everywhere. Suitable mounting points, power, safe access and an unobstructed path still have to exist. Local permissions may still apply even though the vendor says its unlicensed infrared link needs neither spectrum nor right-of-way permits as a product characteristic. The time advantage begins after viable endpoints have been found.

Twenty gigabits is a ceiling, not a Lagos measurement

The datasheet specifies 20 Gbps full duplex, a range from 400 metres to 20 kilometres and two 10 GbE optical data ports. It also advertises throughput, latency, optical-power and pointing telemetry through its management system. Those details make the link observable and integrable into an Ethernet network.

They do not establish that each Lagos path spans 20 kilometres or carries 20 Gbps. No commissioned capacity, actual throughput, utilization, latency, SLA or link budget has been published. A useful operational disclosure would show distributions rather than maxima: path length, busy-hour traffic, weather-related degradation, failover time and monthly availability by site class.

The role is to complement fibre, not make it disappear

The parties give wireless optics two jobs. It can reach a location where fibre has not arrived, and it can provide another path in areas where cable cuts can take days to restore. That makes it an access and resilience instrument. It does not sever the dependency on terrestrial and data-centre networks at either end.

A wireless optical hop may avoid one vulnerable duct or reduce the time needed to bridge a break. The service beyond its endpoints can still depend on fibre, switching, power and upstream capacity. Resilience must therefore be tested end to end: which failure domains are diverse, how traffic moves when one path fails and whether the alternate path has enough capacity at the relevant hour.

Line of sight replaces one constraint with another

Avoiding trenching removes a difficult constraint, but it introduces optical operating requirements. Terminals must maintain alignment; buildings and vegetation can alter the path; power and rooftop access matter; and atmospheric conditions can affect optical transmission. Taara publishes automated acquisition and telemetry capabilities, yet no Lagos field record is available to show how these dependencies behaved.

This is not evidence that the links are unreliable. It is the boundary between a product specification and a service result. Availability, repair time, alarm history and performance through rain or haze would turn the deployment from an architectural case into an operating benchmark.

National expansion remains a sequence of future decisions

Liquid says it is exploring Abuja, Ibadan and Kano. “Exploring” can cover site surveys, commercial discussions or technical assessment; it does not establish an order, funded deployment or construction. Each city will present a different distribution of data centres, enterprise demand, rooftops, rights of access and fibre gaps.

The expansion clock should therefore have explicit states: candidate path, surveyed line of sight, signed customer, installed terminals, commissioned service and revenue traffic. Reporting those stages would prevent a national map from getting ahead of deployed infrastructure and would reveal whether Lagos is repeatable beyond a handful of high-value links.

Sources