What's behind NAP Africa's unprecedented 5Tbps traffic surge?

Hosted within Teraco data centres, NAP Africa facilitates direct interconnections with over 655 networks, including major ISPs, CDNs, cloud providers, and enterprises.

Akamai, Amazon, Cloudflare, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Netflix presence has further boosted its appeal with these companies enabling direct content delivery and cloud access in Africa, enhancing the user experience.

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In addition, offering free peering allows ISPs, content providers, and enterprises to lower transit costs while improving network performance.

In the past year, NAP Africa has expanded its peering community by adding over 40 new peers, including Mimecast, Fortinet, and Tencent.

This expansion has increased traffic exchange efficiency and enriched the peering ecosystem – as has an additional 400Gbps interconnection option, a first for Africa, catering to the growing bandwidth demands of content and cloud providers.

Data sovereignty

Enhanced capacity has played a crucial role in keeping African traffic within the continent, contributing to a more self-sufficient African internet ecosystem.

This has led to improved performance for ISPs, mobile operators, and enterprises.

South Africa's position as a strategic landing point for subsea cables, such as 2Africa, ACE, EASSy, Equiano, METISS, SAT3/SAFE, Seacom, and WACS, has strengthened international connectivity, allowing networks across Southern, East, and West Africa to efficiently access global content.

The exponential growth in mobile internet and fibre broadband penetration across Africa has driven ISPs and mobile operators to rely on data centres to support the increasing demand for video streaming, gaming, and cloud services.

Optimised traffic flows

Additionally, adoption of the Kentik Network Observability platform provides peering members with critical network insights, enabling them to optimise traffic flows, detect anomalies, and enhance performance.

This essential infrastructure for the continent's online transformation will increasingly influence the growth and future of Africa's internet economy.