One of the largest IP transit providers on the African continent, Workonline Communications Group, has deployed its seventh South African point of presence (PoP) at the East London industrial development zone data centre (ELIDZ DC). This is Workonline’s first edge data centre, bringing about a 25% improvement in latency for clients between Cape Town and Durban. The facility is located within the ELIDZ’s secure primary zone in Sunnyridge, East London.
Clyde Bow, business development manager at Workonline, explains that the new PoP will have two benefits. The first is redundancy, as it adds a third route between Cape Town and Durban for more established internet service providers (ISPs) who need an elastic and scalable connectivity solution between multiple data centres. The second is to help grow the internet ecosystem by enabling smaller ISPs in the Eastern Cape area to gain access to quality 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.
The ELIDZ’s data centre, coupled with Workonline’s PoP, is a critical fail-over and redundancy route for IP transit and ethernet private line services (EPL) from Durban to Johannesburg, and supporting routes for Cape Town too. Some of the reasons for choosing the ELIDZ’s data centre was the fail-over measures in place, the quality of the interconnects and the assurance of full redundancy during load shedding, which is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.
“The new PoP will create a new internet ecosystem, helping to build redundancy for those who already have links between Durban and Johannesburg, or Cape Town. This will also bring more internet traffic into East London, helping to boost the economy.”
The data centre already provides services to a variety of sectors in the zone, including automotive, agro processing, logistics and manufacturing. It offers access to leading network, cloud and IT providers through its incubation and innovation initiatives.
“Through offering this PoP, Workonline is helping to build our ICT ecosystem and providing services to our investors and tenants as well as encouraging new companies into the zone, thus creating jobs and growing the local economy,” says Simphiwe Kondlo, ELIDZ chief executive officer.
About 1,000 jobs will be directly and indirectly created 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,” says Bow.
“By adding a further fully-fledged PoP in South Africa, we can deliver latency improvements and support better end-user experiences for internet service providers using our network. The increased network capacity will provide better connectivity options to meet the demanding network requirements from the Eastern Cape through to KwaZulu Natal,” says Bow.
