WIOCC building Johannesburg metro network with 39 PoPs

Chris Wood, CEO of WIOCC, Johannesburg has told Capacity that WIOCC is building a large forty PoP (Point of Presence) metro network for the South African city of Johannesburg. This forty PoP metro network will give WIOCC access to thousands of buildings and bring them on-net and capable of delivering WIOCC’s international carrier business to their end customers doorsteps.

The Johannesburg metro network has three core PoPs and over 39 aggregation and customer provided (CPE) PoPs making it the largest metro network in Africa.  The network covers all of the main business areas of the city. Wood said: “We are buying dark fibre from Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) and that is what the 39 PoPs are being built around.  This is what we need to be doing for our customers and for their enterprise clients. We are not entering the enterprise space – we are driving traffic to our core assets and the enterprise nearer to their clients.”

The amount of capacity used by the WIOCC consortium’s members and customers has doubled in volume in the last 12 months and he thinks that this volume of growth will grow over the next few months, probably doubling every nine months for the foreseeable future.

Wood made it clear that this foray into metro networks was just the beginning and that they will be working on further metro networks in the near future.

Wood made it very clear that WIOCC is not targeting the enterprise space – rather they are enabling their customers to get there. “The market is changing considerably in terms of what our customers want. So therefore, our role now is changing – the industry in Africa is becoming a lot more complex - we have to take our customers deeper into Africa. Whereas in the past our customers were looking for point-to-point bandwidth; then point-to-point bandwidth with a bit of redundancy and now its seamless protection. Moving forward they are all building more complex network solutions for their enterprise customers.”

The Johannesburg metro network will be completed by the third quarter of this year.