NAPAfrica has announced that it has reached a peering throughput milestone of 2Tbps, with more than 500 organisations actively peering
In 2022, NAPAfrica will celebrate a decade of playing a pivotal role in transforming Africa’s internet access and interconnectedness.
“The growth of NAPAfrica is a great African success story, where the Internet exchange’s infrastructure resides within vendor-neutral colocation data centres located in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg," said Jan Hnizdo, CEO, Teraco. “What started as an idea to attract global content to African shores, while also improving latency, has emerged as a leading interconnection hub that is shaping the growth and access of the Internet across the African continent.” It took eight years for traffic throughput on the Internet exchange to reach 1Tbps, and a little more than fifteen months to double that.
Many new enterprises have joined the NAPAfrica peering community, to improve resilience, lower costs and reduce the latency of accessing content and applications, such as Microsoft O365, AWS Cloudfront, Akamai and Cloudflare. NAPAfrica has become a cornerstone for organisations, supporting their internet and communication needs, with work-from-home strategies.
The continued investment into critical telecommunications infrastructure in Africa, especially in the local cloud regions like Microsoft Azure and AWS, subsea cables and broadband fibre, have contributed enormously to the growth of NAPAfrica, as the continent’s demand for content and cloud services is growing.
African enterprises are leveraging the benefits of peering, by connecting with cloud deployments, networks, security providers and content providers within the NAPAfrica ecosystem, as a part of their move to a digital economy.
The number of IXPs in Africa has also grown exponentially, since the launch of NAPAfrica. From 19 in 2012, to 46 in 2020. “A 140% increase in the number of African exchanges is good news for the continent and its interconnectedness. We are proud of the innovative role NAPAfrica has played in shaping Africa’s Internet access and usage,” Jan Hnizdo further added.
Deloitte’s Value of Connectivity report says, that Internet connectivity has hugely benefitted developed economies, providing far-reaching economic and social advantages. Extending these opportunities to developing economies in Africa, is critical in making the transition from a resource-based economy to a knowledge-based economy.
It is in the creation of a knowledge-based economy, where Africa, and NAPAfrica, has seen immense growth of cloud providers, that are launching their services across the continent. Coupled with this, has been the extensive investment and uptake in fibre and subsea cable infrastructure, which allows users access to higher capacities than ever before.
Michele McCann, head of Interconnection and Peering, Teraco, has conveyed that people have now discovered the real power of the Internet, whether for the purpose of working from home, or for pure entertainment. “We are seeing NAPAfrica traffic grow daily, as enterprises start investing in larger bandwidth options, as they address work from home needs. From a content perspective, the UEFA EURO 2020 added over 400Gbps of additional traffic to the exchange,” he added.
Increased demand on networks, and the need to provide internet services to remote users, has increased the adoption of leading cloud and security applications, such as Microsoft O365 services, AWS, Cloudflare and Zscaler.
