CACHEBOX not a bad fit in Gaborone

ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Botswana ISP OPQ Net has bought a CACHEBOX solution to reduce latency, handle bandwidth congestion and improve customer satisfaction.

The ISP serves over 400 corporate and residential customers via a 200Mbps link in Botswana’s capital and largest city, Gaborone.

Technical Director Christopher Premeji was concerned about quality of service.

“One of the difficulties ISPs in our region face is high latency; ours was over 200ms. So our customers would experience excessive buffering when watching online video,” says Christopher.

The issue of latency became even worse when customers downloaded large software updates files simultaneously, congesting the network further.

OPQ Net had to find a way to avoid a costly bandwidth upgrade and improve customers’ quality of experience.

Christopher knew that caching was a sensible solution and researched a few vendors. He found ApplianSys’ CACHEBOX to be ideal due to its affordability.  He deployed a CACHEBOX230 physically close to customers to minimise latency and improve browsing speeds, as well as a second unit in the network core to ease the strain on bandwidth.

CACHEBOX Sales Executive, Vasco Figueiredo says: “We’re really happy to see OPQ Net’s latest reports which show an average of 28% bandwidth saved. Windows updates make up around half of the ISP’s traffic and over 83% of these are served from cache almost four times faster than from the internet!”

About

Established in 2007, OPQ Net is located in Gaborone, Botswana and offers internet services to residential and corporate customers. It operates its own wireless network in Gaborone and nationwide via ADSL, Metro fibre and national fibre.

OPQ Net is also one of the founding members of both the Botswana Internet Service Provider’s Association (BISPA) and the Botswana Internet Exchange (BINX).

The city of Gaborone, founded in 1964, covers an area of 170 kilometre squares and has a population of over 231,000.  The word “Gaborone” literally means “it does not fit badly” or “it is not unbecoming”. Locals refer to it as ‘Gabs’.