NAPAfrica, Africa's premier Internet Exchange Point (IXP) and the world’s seventh-largest, has achieved a major milestone, reaching 4.5 Tbps of traffic as its peering community steadily grows
Recent additions to its roster—including Mimecast, Fortinet, and Tencent—join established members such as Akamai, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), CDN77, Cloudflare, Facebook (Meta), Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, further solidifying NAPAfrica’s status as a vital hub for Africa’s digital infrastructure.
Over the past year, NAPAfrica’s peering community has expanded by more than 40 new members, totaling 652 unique organizations. Headquartered within Teraco’s data centers in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg, NAPAfrica provides essential peering support for internet operators across Africa. Crossing the 4 Tbps traffic milestone in November 2023, the exchange continues to support a robust and diverse network of local and global peers.
Peering's role in African digital growth
“This ongoing growth is a testament to Africa’s vibrant internet community, which has embraced peering, data-intensive applications, cloud adoption, and the rising demand for video, content, and gaming services,” stated Andrew Owens, Interconnection and Peering Lead at Teraco.
“Higher traffic levels between cloud providers, enterprises, and end users highlight how essential peering is in accelerating digital transformation across the continent. Our mission is to equip our clients with a seamless, reliable infrastructure to serve their communities effectively across Africa,” added Owens.
Peering has been instrumental in this success, providing a cost-effective, high-performance method for content providers and businesses to deliver content to end users. By directly connecting with other networks, NAPAfrica members enjoy reduced latency, quicker content delivery, and notable cost savings—key benefits as demand for cloud and entertainment services in Africa surges.
400 Gbps interconnection options
In response to growing traffic, NAPAfrica has enhanced its offerings by becoming the first Internet Exchange in Africa to introduce 400 Gbps interconnection options, addressing the demands of large content and cloud service providers.
Enhanced network visibility with kentik
NAPAfrica is further empowering its members through the Kentik Network Observability platform, a cutting-edge tool that offers valuable insights into network performance. Kentik allows peering managers, network engineers, and security teams to better manage traffic, optimise performance, and anticipate capacity needs, ultimately improving content delivery and bolstering network resilience.
Expanding regional caching
To improve local content delivery, NAPAfrica is now hosting regional cache servers, including Netflix Open Connect cache servers in Cape Town and Durban. By minimising the distance data must travel, these servers offer faster load times for local audiences and make the exchange even more appealing to new members.
Driving Africa’s digital transformation
As international cloud providers and enterprises ramp up their presence in Africa, NAPAfrica is supporting these ambitions. Michele McCann, Head of Platforms at Teraco, highlights, “The presence of hundreds of carriers and networks, key content providers and cloud services underscores a vibrant peering community that drives affordable, effective content distribution, enabling businesses to meet rising demands for cloud-based and entertainment services.”
With essential infrastructure in place, NAPAfrica is paving the way for Africa’s digital future, serving as the backbone of internet services and cloud adoption. This partnership-driven model ensures that organizations can advance internet communications, cloud strategies, and connectivity, meeting Africa’s escalating demand for digital services.
NAPAfrica hits new traffic milestone
