Catchpoint, whose platform provides observability into the internet stack for its customers, and AFR-IX Telecom, one of Africa’s largest internet and data service providers, have united 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, the partners say, they need a new level of visibility into every aspect of the internet stack. By using Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring Platform (IPM), organizations 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.
This pilot project will operate two backbone nodes in Accra in Ghana and two in Lagos in 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.
AFR-IX Telecom operates one of the largest pan-African networks, providing coverage in more than 60 countries. The network, which expands across more than 60 points of presence (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 multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) for African IT infrastructures, which bridges fibre networks with MPLS capabilities.
If project outcomes are successful, Catchpoint will expand the number of synthetic nodes deployed in AFR-IX Telecom.