South Africa’s biggest Internet exchange point hits 4.5Tbps

Not-for-profit Internet exchange point (IXP) NAPAfrica has hit 4.5Tbps in traffic, and its peering ecosystem has grown to 652 members.

The IXP’s traffic has increased by 500Gbps over the past year, as it reported reaching 4Tbps in November 2023. This is more than double the traffic the exchange facilitated in 2021.

Its peering community also saw significant growth, adding over 40 peers, including Mimecast, Fortinet, and Tencent, to its existing members, such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Google.

The exchange initially started with only five members.

“Higher traffic levels between cloud providers, enterprises, and end users highlight how essential peering is in accelerating digital transformation across the continent,” said Teraco interconnecting and peering lead Andrew Owens.

“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.”

Based in Teraco’s data centres in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, the IXP is the first on the continent to offer 400Gbps interconnect options, allowing for it to cater to large-scale content and cloud service providers.

NAPAfrica’s traffic reached 1.5Tbps in 2020, growing by another 500Gbps over the following year.

By 2022 this number had reached 2.8Tbps, meaning the Internet exchange’s traffic grew by 1.7Tbps over the next two years.

The IXP recently said that the online gaming community added over 400Gbps of additional traffic to the exchange in 2023.

Well-known online gaming platforms like Akamai (PlayStation Store), Microsoft (Xbox Store), and Valve (Steam) peer at NAPAfrica.

“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,” said Michele Mcann, Teraco’s head of platforms.

Launched in 2012, NAPAfrica offers access to more than 300 unique networks across over 20 countries in the southern African region.

An IXP is a set of physical infrastructure, including routing and switching equipment, where organisations, network operators, content delivery networks, and cloud services providers interconnect to exchange Internet traffic with others connected to the exchange.

The primary objective of IXPs is to keep local Internet traffic within local infrastructure.

This can help reduce network costs, reduce latency, and improve bandwidth by avoiding the need to route data through upstream Internet service providers.

NAPAfrica has grown its peering members to more than 550 organisations, making it the sixth-largest in the world.

Peering is when two networks on the Internet agree to connect and exchange traffic, allowing them to hand off traffic directly to one another without “transitting” through a third party.

Peering at NAPAfrica is free, and the ability to peer locally helps organisations improve network resilience, lower costs, and reduce the latency customers experience when navigating content and applications online.

NAPAfrica has peering points located in three South African cities — Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg — at Teraco data centres, including:

• Johannesburg 1 / Johannesburg 2 / Johannesburg Teleport
• Cape Town 1
• Durban 1

The IXP has grown significantly since its launch in 2012. By 2014, it reached six members, and Internet traffic peaked at around 6Gbps.

In 2018, it had grown to 350 members, with traffic peaking at 600Gbps. Two years later, membership had grown to 450 networks, and traffic peaked at 1.5Tbps.

Jump to 2024, and the IXP has more than 600 members and has surpassed 4Tbps of traffic.

The number of IXPs on the African continent has also increased since NAPAfrica’s launch, with the Internet Society’s “Moving Toward an Interconnected Africa” report stating that it went from 19 in 2012 to 46 in 2020.

Although it wasn’t the first to advocate for free peering in South Africa, NAPAfrica is considered a pioneer in the industry.