Catchpoint, AFR-IX Telecom join forces to bring more reliable internet to Africa
Catchpoint, an internet resilience company, and AFR-IX Telecom, an internet and data service provider, have embarked on a journey to improve the quality and reliability of internet connectivity on the continent. As the Internet has become increasingly essential for organisations to conduct their operations, they need a new level of visibility into every aspect of the Internet Stack.
By using Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring platform (IPM), organisations will have the operational visibility required to ensure resilience – from applications to cloud services to Internet protocols.
The goal of the project is to improve internet resilience by increasing the number of vantage points across geographies and within infrastructure vantage points from which organisations can monitor their services and applications to ensure high-performing, reliable internet connectivity.
“In today’s world, the Internet is your new local network,” says Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. “Our deep, global observability coverage plus advanced analytics help the world’s leading organisations identify and resolve issues before they impact their customers, their workforce, or their applications.”
This pilot project will operate two backbone nodes in Accra (Ghana) and two in Lagos (Nigeria), allowing Catchpoint’s customers to have visibility over the performance and resilience of their products or services within these regions. The four new nodes supplement Catchpoint’s existing observability network footprint of 22 nodes distributed across Africa, spanning Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa.
“Using AFR-IX cloud infrastructure and connectivity to build backbone nodes in Accra and Lagos has allowed us to deploy rapidly and cost-effectively within budget,” explains Gael Hernandez, director of ISP strategy at Catchpoint. “Our customers are driving the demand for additional vantage points on the continent, so they can measure performance and increase the resilience of their services across Africa.”
AFR-IX Telecom operates Pan-African networks providing coverage in more than 60 countries. The network, which expands across more than 60 PoPs, provides reliable and resilient connectivity in all regions of Africa by connecting countries via subsea and terrestrial cables. AFR-IX telecom also owns a Metro Ethernet network with MPLS for African IT infrastructures, which bridges fibre networks with MPLS capabilities.
“We jumped at the opportunity of working with Catchpoint in improving the state of Internet Resilience in Africa as we know that connectivity and services in the continent are growing faster than anywhere else in the world,” states Jesus Serrano, senior director at AFR-IX Telecom. “Enterprises and firms are expanding in the continent and require robust connectivity services. Internet performance monitoring services provide companies with valuable information to better secure their connectivity expansion needs.”
If project outcomes are successful, Catchpoint will expand the number of synthetic nodes deployed in AFR-IX Telecom.
“One of our primary assets, as expressed by our customers, is the very large number of vantage points from where they can observe their services,” says Daoudi. “We currently have well over 2500 vantage points in 88 countries covering 347 ISPs in 278 cities, and we are continuously adding more. This latest expansion within Africa helps represent a small yet vital step towards that goal.”
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