Hurricane Electric, the world’s largest IPv6-native Internet backbone, has announced the launch of its new point of presence (PoP) in Johannesburg, marking the company’s first expansion into Africa
The new PoP will be housed within Teraco and will aim to meet the growing demand for high-speed connectivity in Southern Africa’s emerging economy. Teraco is one of the largest data centres in Africa as well as the first provider of resilient, carrier, cloud and vendor neutral data environments in Southern Africa.
With the launch of this latest PoP, networks and Internet service providers will have the opportunity to exchange IP traffic or “peer” with Hurricane Electric’s global network via the African Internet exchange point (IXP), NAPAfrica. The new PoP will also provide businesses based within Southern Africa access to the company’s IPv4 and IPv6 network through 100GE (100 gigabit Ethernet), 10GE (10 gigabit Ethernet) and GigE (one gigabit Ethernet) ports. According to the company, this will allow both new and existing customers to experience increased throughput, reduced latency and improved reliability. In addition, clients will enjoy improved fault tolerance, load balancing and congestion management infrastructure capabilities in the delivery of next generation IP services, the company claimed.
Teraco CEO Lex van Wyk said that clients will ultimately benefit from access to an Internet backbone provider, “Hurricane Electric is connected to more than 135 major exchange points and exchanges traffic directly with more than 5,400 different networks. As a result of this new PoP, Teraco’s clients will have direct access to Hurricane Electric’s network, which spans across the world.”
“Hurricane Electric is excited to be expanding into Africa with our first Point of Presence and is well-positioned to meet the needs of the growing Southern African ICT sector,” said Hurricane Electric president Mike Leber. “Going forward, Hurricane Electric looks forward to opening additional sites to remain ahead of the incredible growth in IPv6 traffic in this emerging market.”
