“We’ve seen our IP traffic demand more than doubling on some routes as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, as our OTT, content provider, carrier and ISP clients strive to keep up with their customers’ increased demand for connectivity and content”, says George Cheng, WIOCC’s Principle IP Architect.
“In order for us to deliver traffic at up to 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps) and continue to meet and exceed our clients’ requirements, we have recently upgraded our IP backbone, streamlined our upstream network providers and optimised our presence at key internet exchange points.”
“We continuously monitor our network, improving and upgrading whenever required to give our clients the assurance of reliable, scalable connectivity. Although we could not have anticipated the recent step-change in demand, continual investment in our network and our people to stay ahead of our clients’ evolving needs means that we were very well-placed to deal with even this type of situation”, continued George.
The graph below shows an increase from 25Gbps to a daily peak of over 50Gbps of WIOCC’s upstream international IP traffic into South Africa via the WACS subsea cable, on which WIOCC is one of the largest activators of network capacity.
Hillary Tarus, WIOCC Head of Operations, added: “At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, our key objective was to ensure that our clients experienced uninterrupted service from us. To ensure that network incidents and emergencies could be resolved within the shortest time possible, we immediately obtained “key worker” status for our field and technical teams. We quickly adapted our operations systems to implement home working for our entire Client Champions team, ensuring they remain available to clients 24/7. We also added redundancy at potentially vulnerable locations in the network and increased our sparing, in both cases to take into account the anticipated restrictions on international travel.”
