- OAfabric launched in Lagos (Nigeria) and Kinshasa (DRC), offering direct, low-latency peering to cuts costs and improves performance.
- The platform promises the secure, carrier-neutral interconnection, data sovereignty, and planned pan-African expansion.
What happened: OAfabric launches to solve Africa’s interconnection bottlenecks
Open Access Data Centres (OADC), an arm of the WIOCC Group, has officially launched its new Open Access Fabric (OAfabric) interconnection platform in Lagos, Nigeria, and Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, on 22 August 2025.
OAfabric is designed to solve the digital roadblocks that have harmful effects on African businesses: the limited access to international and local content, steep internet transit costs, latency issues, and patchy infrastructure—notably colocation, power and cooling—besides data sovereignty pressure and regulatory complexity.
By enabling the direct and low-latency peering with both local and global content and cloud providers, it reduces cost to compute, accelerates time-to-market, and enhances digital performance. OAfabric supports a secure, carrier-neutral ecosystem where networks, enterprises, cloud platforms, content providers and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)—such as IXPN in Nigeria and KINIX in the DRC—can interconnect seamlessly.
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Why it’s important
This initiative marks a pivotal step in Africa’s digital transformation. Nigeria, with over 107 million internet users and the continent’s largest digital economy, has long suffered from digital constraints such as slow and costly cloud access—gaps OAfabric directly targets.
Africa’s digital economy is projected to grow from $180 billion in 2025 to $712 billion by 2050, yet current internet penetration sits at just 43 %, well below the global average of 68 %. OAfabric’s deployment helps bridge that divide by lowering latency, improving reliability—illustrated when OADC restored 2 TB of connectivity in Lagos within 48 hours after a subsea cable failure, a task that might otherwise have taken three months.
Besides this platform can scales from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps and suitable even in AI-heavy, hybrid colocation workloads. The secure and direct connections will mitigate the risks in routing via off-net, public internet.
OADC intends to roll out OAfabric across more African markets in the coming months, building a pan-African interconnection backbone primed for the next wave of digital innovation.
