06 March 2026

Ralph Berndt, Executive Head of Sales and Marketing at inq. South Africa

Some may ask how EdgeSentry fits into the data centre discussion. The answer is simple: you can build the most advanced, perfectly cooled, and redundantly powered facility imaginable, but if the final stretch of connectivity to the branch is fragile or unaffordable, uptime becomes a theory, not a reality. In Africa, that last kilometre is where reliability and cost collide, and where the success of every SLA is ultimately decided.

Across the region, we still contend with fibre breaks, uneven last-mile coverage, and intermittent power that push downtime risk onto the enterprise WAN. That is not an indictment of local operators but a design reality. Imported SD-WAN solutions typically assume stable fibre, perpetual power, and dollar-based licensing, which makes them costly to own and slow to support here. The result is a performance and budget gap that branch IT teams live with every day. That is the gap EdgeSentry was built to close.

26 February 2026

A new report titled "African Development Dynamics 2025: Infrastructure, Growth and Transformation," published in late November by OECD and the African Union Commission, highlights that Africa must invest $36 billion annually in fiber optic cables by 2040 to drive its productive transformation.

This figure accounts for roughly 23% of Africa’s total annual infrastructure needs, estimated at $155 billion, though it remains lower than investments required for roads ($50 billion) and railways ($38 billion).