Pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom has delivered the first Microsoft ExpressRoute service peering in Africa to South Africa's Western Cape government.

In a statement the company explained that the service forms part of its CloudConnect offering and enables businesses to establish private connections to Azure.

Previously, customers could only access ExpressRoute via peering locations in Europe, the telco explained.

The Western Cape government has invested in an ExpressRoute link and is "the first customer with a direct private connection to the Azure Cloud that is exchanged locally in Africa."

A comment from the Western Cape Government reads: "Liquid Telecom's CloudConnect service has significantly increased the performance of our cloud services and will support the rollout of leading-edge cloud solutions to more of the region."

Liquid Telecom says it is the only Microsoft partner to be providing an ExpressRoute service across eight African countries on its own fibre, including South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya.

David Behr, Group Chief Product Officer, Liquid Telecom, said, "Our advanced ExpressRoute offering is another important step forward for Africa's Cloud. Liquid Telecom's CloudConnect service is strongly positioned to be the highway that links businesses to a whole host of leading local and global cloud services."

Liquid Telecom added that it can offer ExpressRoute directly to the Azure Cloud in Africa when it goes live in datacentres in South Africa later this year.

According to the telco, this means that it "can guarantee the performance of the link end-to-end in a Service Level Agreement by routing all traffic within Africa" and this will "translate into significantly reduced latency - due to the closer proximity of the datacentres compared to the European-based facilities."