Biggest Internet exchange in South Africa hits 5Tbps

South Africa’s biggest Internet exchange point (IXP), NAPAfrica, exceeded data throughput of five terabits-per-second (Tbps) this past week.

The IXP has shown marked growth over the past decade, reaching 100Gbps in 2016, 500Gbps in 2018, 1Tbps in 2020, 2Tbps in 2022, 3Tbps in 2023, and 4Tbps in 2024.

When it launched in 2012, it began with just 532Mbps of peak traffic.

NAPAfrica remains the continent’s fastest-growing IXP and one of the global top ten IXPs by total traffic volume.

“With over 655 networks peering at its exchange points, NAPAfrica continues to play a critical role in keeping African Internet traffic local, reducing costs, and improving network performance,” it says.

NAPAfrica currently has 2,244 physical connected points and a total connected capacity of 41.5 terabits.

It highlighted 10 factors that have helped drive its growth:

• Strategic locations in South Africa — IXPs in three of Africa’s key Internet traffic hubs: Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg.
• Teraco data centres — NAPAfrica is physically hosted in Teraco data centres, facilitating direct interconnections with over 655 networks, including major ISPs, CDNs, cloud providers, and enterprises.
• Presence of major content and cloud providers — the exchange attracts global tech leaders like Akamai, Amazon, Cloudflare, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Netflix.
• Free peering and cost-efficiency — NAPAfrica offers free peering, enabling ISPs, content providers, and enterprises to reduce transit costs while improving network performance.
• Expanding the peering community — NAPAfrica has added more than 40 new peers in the past year alone, including prominent companies like Mimecast, Fortinet, and Tencent.
• Introducing 400Gbps interconnect options — NAPAfrica offers a first for the continent: 400Gbps interconnects, accommodating the increasing bandwidth demands of content and cloud providers.
• Growing local and regional networks — NAPAfrica has helped keep African traffic on the continent, rather than routing through Europe, reducing latency and costs and improving performance for various operators.
• Subsea cable connectivity boost — South Africa’s position as a landing point for subsea cables like 2Africa, ACE, EASSy, Equiano, METISS< SAT3/SAFE, Seacom, and WACS has bolstered international connectivity.
• Growing mobile and broadband Internet use — Africa is experiencing exponential growth in mobile and fibre penetration, leading ISPs and mobile operators to increasingly rely on NAPAfrica to support demand for video streaming, gaming, and cloud services.
• Enhanced network visibility and performance optimisation—NAPAfrica adopted the Kentik Network Observability platform, which provides peering members with crucial network insights and allows them to optimise various aspects of their operations.

“As Africa’s digital landscape continues to evolve, NAPAfrica remains at the forefront of connectivity, providing the infrastructure necessary to support Africa’s digital transformation,” it says.

“With continued growth and expansion, the exchange is set to play an even more significant role in shaping the future of the African Internet economy.”

In feedback to MyBroadband in May 2024, Michele McCann, head of platforms at Teraco, highlighted several aspects that contributed to NAPAfrica’s growth.

“The surge in data traffic at NAPAfrica is thanks primarily to an African internet community that has embraced the value of peering, the increasing use of data-intensive applications, enterprises moving into the cloud, and the increasing demand for video, content, and gaming delivery services,” she said.

“These trends have driven greater network traffic levels between cloud and service providers, enterprises, and end users across Africa, which has contributed to NAPAfrica’s tremendous growth.”