Adiel Akplogan
lorenetworking
The Togolese engineer who helped bring the first TCP/IP connection to his country, then built the registry that allocates addresses for a continent.
The Quaynor entry notes that connecting Africa meant assembling the institutions alongside the infrastructure. This is what that looked like in one career. He helped establish Togo's first TCP/IP connection in 1996, worked on several of the earliest West African providers, advised the internet development strategy of half a dozen countries, and then in 2003 helped found AFRINIC - the body that decides who gets which addresses across Africa - and ran it for a decade. He intended to stay two years. The origin is worth keeping because it is so unlike the usual founding story: an intern, promised a permanent job if he could fix what others could not, who worked three days and nights and produced a working prototype on French Minitel technology. He called that the start of the journey to the internet in Togo.
Also known as: akplogan, afrinic, togo
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame: an electrical engineer by training, between 1996 and 1997 Akplogan helped establish the first TCP/IP connection in his native Togo; he played a key role in the development of several of the first West African ISPs, and by 2003 had helped start AFRINIC, Africa's first Regional Internet Registry, serving as its first CEO until 2015
- Internet Hall of Fame: Akplogan began as an intern promised a full-time job if he could succeed where others had failed, worked three days and nights to fix the technical problem and produce an online banking prototype based on Minitel technology, and described that as the start of the journey to the internet in Togo; he planned to spend two years at AFRINIC and stayed ten
- AFRINIC on his induction of 27 September 2019, noting he joins Nii Quaynor, one of AFRINIC's founders, among previous inductees