Workonline Communications is consolidating its Cape Town network around Teraco CT2 as customers seek direct national connectivity from a carrier-neutral data centre with the power, space and interconnection ecosystem to support enterprise, cloud, carrier and subsea cable requirements.
Workonline has operated at CT2 in Brackenfell for some time. What has changed is the importance of the facility within its network.
As more customers establish infrastructure at CT2, the facility has become a key aggregation point for traffic moving between Cape Town, Johannesburg and the rest of Workonline’s African network. Its carrier-neutral environment gives customers room to scale, access to multiple network providers and the resilience expected by larger clients.
Its location also places Workonline closer to Western Cape infrastructure supporting newer international subsea systems, including 2Africa, which lands north of Cape Town at Yzerfontein and Duynefontein and is shaping how international capacity is brought into South African and regional networks.
Together, these changes have shifted the centre of gravity of Workonline’s Cape Town network away from its original PoP at the Bree Street data centre, now operated by Open Access Data Centres (OADC).
Workonline will retire the Bree Street PoP and move the small number of remaining services away from the facility as part of the planned network change.
“This is less about closing a PoP and more about how Cape Town’s connectivity landscape has changed,” says Clyde Bow, Head of Procurement at Workonline Communications. “Bree Street played an important role in our network for many years, but demand is now increasingly centred around CT2. Customers want to be in a carrier-neutral facility where there is space to grow, strong power infrastructure, an expanding interconnection ecosystem and a more logical path to the cable systems and national routes that matter to them.”
Following customer demand
CT2 has grown substantially since opening in Brackenfell, attracting network operators, cloud and content providers, enterprises and other members of Cape Town’s digital infrastructure ecosystem. For Workonline, that growth is translating directly into customer demand for backbone connectivity from a site that is increasingly relevant to both domestic traffic flows and international cable capacity.
“Once customers are asking for direct NLD services from a particular location, it needs to be treated as an important part of the backbone rather than simply another local PoP,” says Bow. “The network has to reflect where customers actually need capacity delivered.”
Workonline is therefore strengthening the connection between CT2 and its national backbone towards Johannesburg, allowing traffic to move onto the wider network without first traversing another Cape Town PoP. Technically, that creates a cleaner and more resilient architecture: fewer unnecessary hops, more direct routing into the national backbone and better options for separating primary and secondary paths.
For customers, the benefit is improved diversity and redundancy between Cape Town and Johannesburg, with services at CT2 able to take advantage of more direct national paths and stronger failover design. That becomes increasingly important for organisations using CT2 as a Cape Town aggregation point, for providers connecting to major clients, and for networks carrying traffic linked to subsea systems such as 2Africa.
Cape Town’s connectivity map is changing
CT2’s rise has coincided with a broader shift in Cape Town’s international connectivity landscape. Subsea systems including 2Africa and Equiano have added significant capacity to the Western Cape, complementing established systems such as WACS, ACE and SAT-3/SAFE.
2Africa’s Western Cape landings at Yzerfontein and Duynefontein are particularly relevant because both are north of central Cape Town, increasing the importance of the northern corridor for moving international capacity into national and regional networks.
CT2’s position in Brackenfell, combined with its growing carrier and interconnection ecosystem, makes it increasingly relevant to that traffic flow. For customers planning long-term growth, its combination of carrier neutrality, available scale and proximity to important cable routes makes it a more future-facing location for Cape Town connectivity.
“The physical geography of a network matters,” says Bow. “Where cable systems land, where customers build, where carriers interconnect and where national routes start and end all influence how you design the network. Over time those points change, and good network engineering means changing with them.”
Retiring infrastructure that has served its purpose
Workonline’s Bree Street PoP dates back to an earlier phase of the company’s Cape Town network and was part of the infrastructure on which its original national network was built.
The facility itself, now operated by OADC, remains part of Cape Town’s carrier-neutral data centre ecosystem. For Workonline, however, maintaining a PoP there no longer adds sufficient value to its current architecture. The few remaining customer services will be migrated before the PoP is retired, with no impact on the broader Workonline network or Internet ecosystem.
Bow says this is an important part of how Workonline approaches network investment.
“We don’t believe network growth is simply about adding more dots to a map,” he says. “Every PoP needs a clear purpose. Sometimes that means investing in a new location or increasing capacity, and sometimes it means recognising that the role of a location has changed and moving the network forward.”
The consolidation around CT2 forms part of Workonline’s ongoing investment in a resilient South African backbone and wider pan-African network, with an emphasis on direct routing, physical diversity, efficient access to regional and international infrastructure, and customer access to the data centre environments where major networks and cable systems are increasingly converging.
“For us, the test is straightforward,” concludes Bow. “Are we in the places our customers need us to be, and can we connect those places into the rest of our network in the most direct and resilient way possible? Increasingly in Cape Town, CT2 is one of those places.”