Denis Opudo
NAPAfrica which is the biggest Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Africa is amongst the top 15 of the biggest global IXPs. The announcement was made by Teraco startup which is the only vendor-neutral data center in Africa. The rankings were made in relation to the number of peering members or unique ASNs within the IXP. Teraco Data Environments was launched in 2008 making it the first provider of vendor-neutral, carrier, resilient and cloud data environment in SA. According to Interconnection & Peering, Teraco’s technical manager Andrew Owens, NAPAfrica has a total of 323 members. He adds that the body has established itself fully as sub-Saharan Africa’s content and interconnection hub. Additionally, NAPAfrica is serving 16 countries that are connected to more than 350 unique ASNs.
According to Owens, IXP’s success should be gauged by its ability to contribute to the growth of the internet scene across its community. Many NAPAfrica members agree with that despite the fact that 80% of their traffic crops up at the exchange. It lowers costs of transport within the southern region and helps customers to give better services at more competitive prices. Internet Service Provider’s Association (ISPA) was approached by Teraco in 2010 with a suggestion of relocating Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX) to Cape Town Internet Exchange (CINX) located at the facilities of Teraco. This is given the fact that this was the only available neutral data center at the time. ISPA rejected the proposal that led to the development of an exchange by Andrew Owens and Lex van Lex.
The development reached its first major step in 2012 when Google decided to join IXP and started peering its materials. The exchange went ahead to record a new high traffic of 1Gbps after it was joined by many content providers like Optinet and Akamai. There is where members realized the importance of having local content. Owens adds that the exchange is more attractive because content players watch traffic increase and the number of users. NAPAfrica went beyond its daily peak in 2016 hitting 100Gbps. In the same year Telkom Openserve came out and showed its interest to peer and the community was strongly placed on the map as the biggest in the continent. NAPAFrica community later on at the start of last year upgraded its infrastructure to a modern Arista website. According to Owens, the upgrade was due to the customer’s demand.
He adds that Afrihost was their first customers to upgrade to a 100Gbps port and there has been a high demand for that. He says that NAPAfrica website has traffic, hardware, and capability to support the required investment level into Internet infrastructure. He adds that prices have also gone down to almost 25% compared to 2016. This makes the option affordable when upgrading. Xalam Analytics stated that SA is continuing to grow and is proving itself to be the largest colocation market in Africa this is larger than a combination of 20 markets from Africa. Therefore, this proves that IXP’s role is very important. Since the launch of NAPAfrica, sub-Saharan Africa has enjoyed a lot of benefits from international and local contents. The content has come from leading providers like Google, Akamai, Netflix, Facebook, Optinet, Verizon Digital Media, Cloudflare, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Many major network operators in SA peer at NAPAfrica. This means that many people are in a position to access larger content even on the streets. Owens says that the company will still work on upgrading its infrastructure further. There is an increase in the volume of Internet traffic in SA which has seen Johannesburg hit 400Gbps. Cape Town on the other side is almost getting to 100Gbps.
