Pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom, a subsidiary of Econet Global, is looking to expand its voice service offering into six countries in Africa utilising solutions from Metaswitch, a global cloud native communications software provider.

The six countries targeted include Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

In a statement the companies have listed products that form the basis of the offering as Clearwater vIMS Core, Perimeta vSBC, Service Assurance Server (SAS) and Multiservice Telephony Application Servers (MTAS) products.

Elements of the solution include Metaswitch Clearwater, a cloud-native virtual IMS core; Perimeta, a virtualised SBC that distributes signaling and media functionality across commodity hardware in the cloud and the Accession powered hosted UC&C suite that enables carriers to extend their business telephony services to any end device.

The network will also support deployment of the Metaswitch Accession Communicator unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) application.

Liquid Telecom's fibre network is said to be over 50,000 km and the company also offers cloud-based services including Microsoft Office365 and Microsoft Azure.

According to the company's 2017 African Cloud Report, multinationals expanding across the continent are doing so on the back of cloud-based infrastructure.

"For Africa's proliferating SME sector, cloud-based services provide affordable access to enterprise-grade infrastructure and applications. While for African governments seeking more cost-effective and efficient service delivery, cloud-based services offer a compelling value proposition," reads an excerpt from the research report.

David Behr, Group Chief Product Officer, Liquid Telecom said, "The Metaswitch solution will enable us to expand our business voice service footprint and portfolio rapidly by deploying a centralised network with regional hubs and much lighter networks in each country we serve. This significantly lowers both our capex and opex for services like SIP trunking and hosted UC and is backed by Metaswitch's superior professional services and support organisations. Metaswitch has been a true partner to us throughout."

Martin Lund, CEO of Metaswitch added, "Agile providers like Liquid often out-innovate global incumbents, driven as they are to push the edge of network and service velocity using network functions virtualisation. We look forward to continuing to work closely with Liquid as its service area and voice service portfolio continue to expand."