As NAPAfrica nears its tenth year of operations, the group has reached a peering throughput milestone of more than 2 Tb/s, with over 500 organisations now actively peering.

Launched in 2012 to stimulate the development of an Internet exchange point (IXP) within a truly vendor-neutral environment, NAPAfrica has grown into the continent’s biggest IXP and the seventh-largest globally by number of member connections.

“The growth of NAPAfrica is a great African success story. 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,” says Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo.

It took eight years for traffic throughput on the Internet exchange to reach 1 Tb/s and only a little over 15 months to double that.

The number of IXPs in Africa has also grown exponentially since the launch of NAPAfrica, increasing from 19 in 2012 to 46 in 2020.

“African enterprises are leveraging the benefits of peering by connecting with cloud deployments, networks, security providers and content providers within the NAPAfrica ecosystem as part of their move to a digital economy,” he says.

NAPAfrica has become a cornerstone for organisations in supporting their Internet and communication needs with work-from-home strategies, as increased demand on networks to service remote users has driven the adoption of key cloud and security applications.

Further, many new enterprises are joining 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, Hnizdo adds.

“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 400 Gb/s of additional traffic to the exchange,” comments Teraco interconnection and peering head Michele McCann.

Similar traffic growth numbers are being experienced across the continent, particularly in Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Réunion, Seychelles, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

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 also contributed enormously to the growth of NAPAfrica, as the continent’s demand for content and cloud services grows apace.

“NAPAfrica has made it possible for peering members to access global content within African borders and keep local traffic local, whereas, previously, much of our traffic was routed through Europe,” says Hnizdo.

“It is in the creation of a knowledge-based economy where Africa, and NAPAfrica, have seen the immense growth of cloud providers that are launching their services across the continent as the need for cloud-based technology increases. Coupled with this has been the extensive investment and uptake in fibre and subsea cable infrastructure, allowing users access to higher capacities than ever before.”