The Workonline Communications Group, one of Africa’s largest IP transit providers, has expanded its services to East London.
The telecommunications service provider deployed its seventh point of presence (PoP) in South Africa at the East London Industrial Development Zone Datacentre (ELIDZ DC).
Workonline’s new PoP is its first edge data centre, and it said it would provide a 25% latency improvement for its clients between Cape Town and Durban.
Workonline business development manager Clyde Bow said the new facility provides two benefits in addition to the improved latency.
“The first is redundancy, as it adds a third route between Cape Town and Durban for more established ISPs who need an elastic and scalable connectivity solution between multiple data centres,” Bow said.
He explained that the PoP also helps grow the Internet ecosystem in South Africa by enabling smaller ISPs in the Eastern cape to access local and global Internet routes at a reduced cost, eliminating the need for inter-data centre connectivity.
“In both cases, these ISPs can scale between 100Mbps and 100Gbps and have increased commercial flexibility in their offerings,” Bow said.
“The increased network capacity will provide better connectivity options to meet the demanding network requirements from the Eastern Cape through to KwaZulu Natal.”
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Workonline said the move would help directly and indirectly create around 1,000 jobs through the new PoP as people connect to the Internet and more companies are encouraged to build offerings in the Zone.
“One of our customers is even enabling fibre to the shack connections,” Bow said.
Source: My Broadband
