Launch of NAPAfrica boosts Teraco Data's growth

"This year alone we launched the first free and public peering service, NAPAfrica, as well as the African Cloud eXchange (ACX), a co-location space for sharing and selling cloud services," says Lex van Wyk, managing director at Teraco.

Free peering service NAPAfrica was launched in March 2012 with an initial exchange of 64Mbps. In the five months since launch, NAPAfrica is already reaching volumes over 700Mbps. In addition, the service has seen its initial 16 members swell to over 40 with no sign of slowing down. "Multi-lateral peering is unique to NAPAfrica in South Africa and allows for partners to interconnect freely, reducing costs for Internet service providers and their clients, and increasing network redundancy and routing flexibility," says Van Wyk.

Connected to all undersea cables

The African Cloud eXchange, a vendor neutral co-location space for the sharing and selling of cloud services, aims to establish South Africa as a central hub for international access providers and cloud services to support the rest of Africa. "The facility is connected to all of the undersea cables offering a combined 28 landing points along the east and west coasts of the continent. In addition, Teraco boasts connectivity to all the major carriers operating in South Africa and several active cloud providers, which positions us as the obvious choice for cloud providers to co-locate their service offering," continues Van Wyk.

Recent calculations show that the total submarine cable capacity into sub-Saharan Africa currently stands at 21 terabytes. Van Wyk says that the combined capacity of all three Teraco facilities is 23 terabytes taking into account capacity from international carriers, mobile carriers, local carriers and fibre infrastructure providers. "The advantages of co-location includes reduced interconnect fees, the freedom to select the best access provider and easy connections to the numerous other clients housed in the data centre.

"The combined impact of just NAPAfrica and the African Cloud eXchange positions us as leaders in the market, and we are excited to bring new and innovative products to different sectors in the near future," concludes Van Wyk.