New-York based Catchpoint, the Internet Resilience Company, and AFR-IX Telecom have formed a collaboration to improve the quality and reliability of the internet in Africa.
“As the Internet has become increasingly essential for organizations to conduct their operations, they need a new level of visibility into every aspect of the Internet Stack,” a recent press release states. “By using Catchpoint’s market-leading Internet Performance Monitoring Platform (IPM), organizations will have the operational visibility required to ensure resilience – from applications to cloud services to Internet protocols.”
The idea for the project was developed to increase the sum of vantage points, allowing organizations to monitor their services on a wider scale and improve the overall performance of Internet Resilience.
“In today’s world, the Internet is your new local network,” Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint said. “Our deep, global observability coverage plus advanced analytics help the world’s leading organizations identify and resolve issues before they impact their customers, their workforce, or their applications.”
The project will run two backbone nodes in Accra (Ghana) and two in Lagos (Nigeria), expanding customer’s visibility to the performance of their slate of products. The new additions will offer further support to Catchpoint’s observability network, consisting of 22 nodes 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,” Gael Hernandez, Director of ISP Strategy at Catchpoint said. “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.”
Spanning more than 60 countries and PoPs, AFR-IX Telecom is one of the largest Pan-African networks, connecting various geographical locations via subsea and terrestrial cables. The company also owns a Metro Ethernet network “with MPLS for African IT infrastructures, which bridges fiber 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,” Jesus Serrano, Senior Director at AFR-IX Telecom said. “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.”
Upon obtaining positive results from the project, the company plans to expand its sum of synthetic node deployments 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,” Daoudi said. “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.”