Workonline Communications is a leading provider of IP transit and wholesale connectivity services in Africa. Workonline operates multiple points of presence (POPs) across Europe and Africa. This expansion into Singapore extends the edge of the company's network into Asia-Pacific and will significantly improve performance between southern Africa and Asia-Pacific.

"Through this expansion, we now offer an important opportunity for Asian networks looking to reach Africa with the lowest possible latency. Workonline's primary path is over the South Africa Far East (SAFE) cable system between South Africa and Singapore, which provides much better performance than current market alternatives," says Edward Lawrence, Director of Business Development at Workonline Communications.

Due to the choice of cable system, combined with the deployment in Singapore, Workonline can now provide its customers with the lowest latency possible between the southern Africa and Asia-Pacific regions. The latency on the Workonline network between Johannesburg and Singapore now stands at 117ms, compared with approximately 397ms when using traditional paths via Europe.

After careful consideration, Workonline chose to deploy in the Equinix SG1 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre, one of the three data centres in Singapore, namely SG1, SG2 and SG3. Equinix Singapore data centre campus is Asia-Pacific's network hub, with the most networked data centres in the region. The campus houses many of the international and regional networks connecting South Asia, and is also the leading point of access to one of the world's three Global Roaming Exchange (GRX) peering points. There is a dense concentration of financial services companies, cloud services, biomedical sciences, IT, communications, media, physical sciences and engineering industries.

Equinix is a global interconnection and data centre company, operating 200 carrier-neutral data centres across over 52 metros. Through Platform Equinix, which provides access to vital ecosystems, customers can interconnect to one another and to more than 1 800 available networks, as well as more than 2 900 cloud and IT providers. This means users can reach 80% of the world's population in less than 20 milliseconds, inside the most interconnected data centres in the world.

Andrew Rigoli, Vice-President of Corporate Development & Strategy, Equinix Asia-Pacific, said: "As a regional interconnection hub, Equinix data centres in Singapore house dense networks, cloud and IT ecosystems that will enable Workonline Communications to provide its customers with low latency and high performing communications services. At the same time, Workonline Communications can utilise Equinix facility in Singapore as a gateway to other Asian markets."