Coalition for Digital Africa Launches a New Initiative to Help African Connectivity

The Coalition for Digital Africa is launching another initiative aimed at strengthening Internet infrastructure to bring more Africans online. This latest project is focused on installing two new monitoring probe nodes in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) service level agreement monitoring (SLAM) system within the Africa region. This will provide more accurate measurements of service availability and performance monitoring experienced by Internet users in Africa.

The SLAM system relies on a network of 40 probe nodes globally distributed across all ICANN geographic regions to monitor the availability and performance of critical services of top-level domains (TLDs). In 2013, ICANN deployed the SLAM system to measure in real-time the service level agreement (SLA) defined in Specification 10 of the Base gTLD Registry Agreement related to the critical services provided by the registry operator. Since then, ICANN has been working to maintain monitoring probe nodes across all its geographic regions.

As part of this initiative, ICANN is deploying two new monitoring probe nodes within the Africa geographic region, in Lagos, Nigeria, and Cairo, Egypt, in addition to the existing probe node located in Johannesburg, South Africa. These efforts help diversify SLA monitoring of TLD registry operators’ critical service performance as measured from locations within Africa and provide improved visibility to detect incidents where service level requirements are not met by TLD registry operators.