Catchpoint and AFR-IX Telecom join forces to bring more reliable internet to Africa
NEW YORK & BARCELONA, Spain, May 24, 2023–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Catchpoint, The Internet Resilience Company and AFR-IX Telecom, one of Africa’s largest Internet and data service providers, have embarked on a journey to improve the quality and reliability of Internet connectivity in the continent. As the internet has become increasingly essential for organizations to conduct their operations, a new level of visibility into every aspect of the internet stack is needed. Using the market-leading Catchpoints Internet Performance Monitoring Platform (IPM), organizations will have the operational visibility needed to ensure resilience from applications to cloud services to Internet protocols.
The goal of the project is to improve the resilience of the Internet by increasing the number of vantage points in geographic areas and within the infrastructure vantage points from which organizations can monitor their services and applications to ensure reliable Internet connectivity and high performance.
“In today’s world, the Internet is your new local network,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. “Our extensive global observability coverage and advanced analytics help the world’s leading organizations 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), enabling Catchpoints customers to gain visibility into the performance and resilience of their products or services within these regions. The four new nodes complement Catchpoint’s existing observability network footprint of 22 nodes spread across Africa, covering Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.
“Using cloud infrastructure and AFR-IX connectivity to set up backbone nodes in Accra and Lagos allowed us to deploy quickly and cost-effectively within budget,” explained Gael Hernandez, director of ISP strategy at Catchpoint. “Our customers are driving demand for additional vantage points on the continent so they can measure performance and increase the resilience of their services across Africa.”
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AFR-IX Telecom operates one of the largest pan-African networks providing coverage in more than 60 countries. The network, which spans over 60 PoPs, provides reliable and resilient connectivity across all regions of Africa by connecting countries via undersea and land-based cables. AFR-IX Telecom also has a Metro Ethernet with MPLS network for African IT infrastructure, which connects fiber networks with MPLS functionality.
“We jumped at the opportunity to work with Catchpoint to improve the resilient state of the internet in Africa as we know that connectivity and services on the continent are growing faster than anywhere else in the world,” said Jesus Serrano, Senior Director of AFR-IX Telecom. “Businesses and enterprises are expanding across the continent and require robust connectivity services. Internet performance monitoring services provide businesses with valuable insights to better protect their expanding connectivity needs.”
If the project’s results are successful, Catchpoint will expand the number of synthetic nodes deployed in AFR-IX Telecom.
“One of our main assets, as expressed by our clients, is the very large number of vantage points from which they can observe their services,” said Daoudi. “We currently have over 2,500 observation points in 88 countries covering 347 ISPs in 278 cities and are continually adding more. This latest expansion into Africa is a small but vital step towards that goal.”
About capture point
Catchpoint is the internet resilience company. Major global brands rely on Catchpoint and its deep observability across thousands of global vantage points to increase their Internet resiliency by detecting any issues before they impact customers, workforce, networks, website performance, applications and APIs . The Catchpoint platform combines synthesis, RUM, performance optimization, high-fidelity data, and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics to provide unmatched observability across the Internet stack. Learn more at http://www.catchpoint.com
About AFR-IX Telecom
AFR-IX Telecom is an Internet Service Provider providing Internet and data services to businesses, international carriers and telecom operators in Africa and offering connectivity solutions to hundreds of customers. AFR-IX telecommunication solutions include MPLS, DIA, IPLC, Managed services & Colocation, IP Transit, DDoS Shield, Cloud Services & IaaS, SD-WAN, etc. In doing so, AFR-IX provides quality services to an expanding economic market. Learn more at https://www.afr-ix.com