Telecommunications multinational Angola Cables has recorded a triple-digit growth in traffic during the first quarter of the year as it opens and upgrades several points of presence (PoP), combined with the impact of several government-ordered Covid-19 lockdown regulations.
Overall, the 2020 first-quarter traffic growth on the company’s Internet protocol (IP) network surged 170% compared with the first quarter of 2019.
“Although a significant portion of this growth can be attributed to the surge in demand following the lockdown regulations imposed by many governments in curbing the spread of Covid-19, additional traffic has also resulted from the opening and upgrading of points of presence in the main global traffic exchange locations in recent months,” said Angola Cables CEO António Nunes.
New activations, the expansion of services and more requests for burstable solutions and IP Flex options by customers had also driven traffic growth.
The group introduced two new PoPs in Brazil to boost connectivity between networks and digital ecosystems in Latin American.
“The addition of more access points to our network gives us wider market coverage and better content aggregation that can be delivered to our partners and customers at lower latencies,” he said.
Despite being impacted by the West African Cable System and South Atlantic Telecommunications cable 3 outages earlier this year, Angola Cables accommodated Internet service providers and other entities by re-routing traffic and providing capacity on its South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) connection.
“Such incidents served to underline the importance of service providers having adequate redundancy and continuity measures in place to minimise the impact of such outages and the reduction in service capabilities to the end customer,” he commented.
The high volume of traffic generated on the network has predominantly been centred around the Atlantic region on the SACS, Monet sub-cable connections which link Africa to Brazil and the US.
"From our perspective, we have long anticipated the growth in demand for capacity and data in the growing digital economy and have geared our cable network to meet the challenges associated with our digitally-connected future.”
Nunes concluded that international wholesale carriers would need to step up and make adequate provision to protect and manage their networks as demand for capacity and data reached record levels of use and consumption.