On a mission to meet the connectivity demands of Africa’s digital transformation, leading wholesale operator WIOCC opted for Telehouse as a key connectivity hub for its clients to expand and extend their core networks.
WIOCC is Africa’s leading provider of carrier-neutral, carrier-scale and future-proofed network infrastructure. Acting as the continent’s digital backbone, the organisation focuses on developing resilient, end-to-end wholesale connectivity solutions within, into and out of Africa. Cloud operators, content providers, fixed and mobile telcos, ISPs and numerous other operators can leverage opportunities via 75,000km of terrestrial fibre and over 200,000km of subsea systems.
Following its establishment in 2008, WIOCC is revolutionising high-capacity connectivity between Africa and the rest of the world to meet evolving customer requirements.
After initially working largely as a service provider of reliable international connectivity to its 14 founding shareholders, WIOCC rapidly expanded its wholesale market position to become a neutral carrier, helping to meet the end-to-end connectivity demands of a wide range of African and international clients.
Whilst major global cloud operators are increasingly extending their networks and migrating content into Africa, much of the continent remains underserved in terms of internet infrastructure, with poor connectivity hindering economic growth.
WIOCC is a key partner in the Equiano cable, a next-generation subsea internet cable deployed by Google along Africa’s western seaboard between South Africa and Portugal. As well as landing the cable into Group company Open Access Data Centres’ Lagos facility in Nigeria, WIOCC is also a fibre-pair investor in the system. This deployment is helping the company both to expand its capacity and to reinforce network resilience all the way from South Africa to the UK, increasing clients’ ability to reliably access the data centres, telco and carrier interconnect points where they need a presence by taking advantage of WIOCC’s open-access, carrier-neutral infrastructure model.
High-capacity, scalable connectivity solutions are vital for cloud operators and content providers needing to migrate content sitting in the rest of the world into caches and edge nodes in Africa, thereby bringing lower latency and more reliable services to consumers in those regions. With many of its clients operating European networks, Telehouse provides a perfect hub for clients wishing to interconnect in London with their core networks. WIOCC is currently utilising 13 racks in Telehouse North Two, North, East and West.
“Telehouse is one of the select few hubs we use in London, and it’s become a very important part of our network. All the data centres we use in London are interconnected with our own dark fibre, so we can carry traffic to wherever our clients need to connect. A number of our clients are already located in Telehouse data centres, so it made complete sense for us to be part of that hub to better service them,” said Jason Tutty, VP Networks & Operations at WIOCC.
By extending its Equiano cable investment into Telehouse, WIOCC is able to offer its clients high-scale, high-quality and high-speed connections between London, Nigeria and South Africa. The cable itself brings connectivity of over 150 terabits, 10 times the size of any cable deployed into Africa previously. By 2025, internet speeds in Nigeria are projected to increase by five times and to almost triple in South Africa due to Equiano.
In terms of WIOCC’s operations, Telehouse’s extensive physical security measures, including perimeter fencing, CCTV and biometric access requirements, deliver high levels of reassurance for both internal operations and WIOCC clients, providing peace-of-mind that clients’ networks are safe. Engineers need regular access to equipment to ensure optimum uptime for clients, so Telehouse has accommodated such requirements to allow flexible task completion. The success of the partnership to date means that the organisation is planning further increases in rack capacity in the near future.
“By acting as one of our main connectivity hubs in Europe, Telehouse has been a key partner in our mission to grow the reliability of services across the African region. We’re looking forward to continuing to work closely with Telehouse as we extend our capabilities through deployment of a world-class, pan-African, carrier-neutral data centre footprint that will deliver an unparalleled client experience,” said Chris Wood, WIOCC Group CEO.
