Liquid Intelligent Technologies has spent two years quietly replacing parts of its Lagos delivery network with beams of light. It now runs nearly a dozen links across the city that carry data through the air rather than through buried fibre.
The links use Taara, a wireless optical technology developed inside X, Alphabet’s moonshot lab, and spun out as its own company. Taara and Liquid, a business of Cassava Technologies, said on 5 August 2026 that the deployment now serves internet service providers, banks, hotels and a utility company in Lagos, Nigeria.
Fibre without the trench
Taara’s Lightbridge terminals send data on narrow, invisible beams between two points, carrying up to 20 Gbps over distances of up to 20 km. Because nothing is buried, a link needs no trenching, no civil works and no spectrum licence, which is what makes it attractive in a city where digging is slow, expensive or simply not permitted.
“Traditional fibre deployments aren’t always a possibility, especially across difficult terrains,” said Eugene Uka, acting chief executive of Liquid Intelligent Technologies Nigeria. “Taara links can often be installed and activated within hours.” The companies said links typically go live in days where a fibre build would take weeks.
Resilience is the real sell
The deployment distributes capacity from Liquid’s points of presence at Africa Data Centres and other Nigerian facilities to enterprises beyond the reach of existing fibre. It also gives those customers a second path when the first one breaks.
That matters in Lagos, where a fibre cut can take days to repair, and construction damage is routine. A light link running alongside a fibre route is a fallback that does not share the same trench, and therefore does not fail with it.
Bhavesh Mistry, Taara’s regional lead for Africa, was careful not to oversell the substitution. “Fibre remains an essential part of modern communications infrastructure, and will for some time,” he said, describing wireless optical links as another tool for extending capacity rather than a replacement.
Where it goes next
Liquid said it is exploring extending the technology to Abuja, Ibadan and Kano. Taara says Lightbridge is deployed in more than 20 countries with operators including T-Mobile, Airtel, Digicel and SoftBank.
The Nigerian context helps explain the appetite. Liquid closed a $660m debt round in April, and other operators are still committing capital to conventional builds: Dimension Data raised $2.9m to expand Nigerian fibre in July. Light links are being added around that fibre, not instead of it.
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