Workonline Communications, one of the largest IP network providers in Africa, has launched its first Point of Presence (PoP) in Nigeria, further enhancing the group's West African presence.

The new megaPoP went live late last year, ready to provide 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps services at Rack Centre in Lagos, West Africa's best-connected datacentre. This adds to the growing list of African markets in which the company manages megaPoPs including Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa.

Workonline's presence will allow content distribution networks, and internet service providers with stringent quality needs to deploy in Nigeria, and will help those already in-country to keep African traffic in Africa.

Benjamin Deveaux, Head of Business Development at Workonline Group explains: 'When content providers deploy in a market, they can reduce the time it takes to load the content they serve over the internet. Although many content networks have now deployed in parts of Africa, there is still around 80% of Africa's internet capacity which goes back to Europe where the content is hosted. Workonline is on a mission to help Africa keep traffic on the continent to increase the quality for the user and develop the African internet economy.'

Workonline (AS 37271), founded in 2006, is one of the fastest-growing IP transit networks in Africa. The company specializes in providing wholesale IP transit (IPT), remote peering, and Layer 2 Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) services.

Jasper Lankhorst, Group CEO of Rack Centre, welcomed Workonline to its carrier- and cloud-neutral data centre which has earned several ISO certificates including ISO 27001, the global information security quality standard. Since its inception in 2013, Rack Centre has maintained a 100% uptime and offers its customers 100% neutral access and uncapped interconnect capacities.

In early 2019, Workonline Communications became the first African wholesale IP transit provider to deploy Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) Origin Validation (OV) to improve the security of internet routing. Workonline is also an active member of the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) operator community, and was the first African network to implement all four of the MANRS routing manifesto actions.

These MANRS routing manifesto actions are a commitment by a network to provide the highest feasible levels of security, stability and performance for interconnectivity with other network operators.

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