Orange has rolled out West Africa’s first very large-capacity IP Point of Presence (PoP), located in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, set to enhance Internet connectivity in the sub-region by offering faster connection speeds and improved reliability for wholesale customers.
While Abidjan also hosts a landing point for the ACE submarine cable, a 17,000km-long cable which runs down the west coast of Africa from Europe, this makes it a suitable location for the IP PoP facility and allows for optimal connectivity with networks across the entire region.
An IP Point of Presence is part of the technical infrastructure equipment necessary to enable local networks to access the Internet through an interconnection point with long-distance carrier networks.
As a fully redundant IP PoP, the new facility opens up the region and allows Orange to offer high quality, secure connections over the wholesale market to West African countries. Over the medium and long term, the Abidjan IP PoP will facilitate the expansion of the African IP Market, which is an area of rapidly growing economic activity that sees Internet traffic rising at a rate of 41 per cent per year says a report.
By connecting to this very large-capacity PoP, wholesale customers, regional operators and Internet Service Providers will benefit from cost-effective connections to a Tier 1 operator. Additionally, the customer experience will be improved due to this connection point which will bring content providers closer to Internet users.
Present in 30 countries, one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators with sales of 41 billion euros in 2013 and has 164,000 employees worldwide at 31 March 2014, including 101,000 employees in France, Orange is a major Internet connectivity enabler and already has a strong position in Africa, where capacity is constantly increasing. Its objective is to adapt to changes in the industry and become the leading operator in the Internet era