Teraco’s NAPAfrica tops 1Tbit/s of peak capacity

Data centre operator Teraco’s Internet exchange point NAPAfrica has topped 1Tbit/s, or a million megabits per second, of peak traffic for the first time.

NAPAfrica, which was launched in 2012 with five participants, first recorded traffic of just 532Mbit/s. It now has 440 ASNs, or autonomous system numbers, connected from around the world, including 26 African countries.

Teraco said in a statement that NAPAfrica is now the seventh largest Internet exchange point in the world.

NAPAfrica members include global content and cloud providers, 250 telecommunications operators, managed service providers and a growing enterprise base.

“Of significance is the interest shown by South Africa’s neighbouring countries looking to connect via NAPAfrica,” said Andrew Owens, manager of interconnection and peering at Teraco. “Telcos in countries as far afield as Angola, Togo and the Democratic Republic of Congo have joined the exchange.”

According to Web infrastructure company CloudFlare, an Internet exchange point, or IXP, is a physical location through which Internet infrastructure companies such as Internet service providers and content distributors connect with each other.

These locations exist on the “edge” of different networks, and allow network providers to share transit outside their own networks.

By having a presence inside an IXP location, companies are able to shorten their path to the transit coming from other participating networks, thereby reducing latency, improving round-trip time and potentially reducing costs.

Owens said NAPAfrica’s recent growth has been driven by the uptake in networks and enterprises accessing content and cloud applications. – © 2020 NewsCentral Media