NAPAfrica, South Africa’s largest Internet exchange point (IXP), has exceeded a data throughput of five terabits per second (Tbps), marking a significant milestone in its continued growth.
Since its launch in 2012 with just 532Mbps of peak traffic, the exchange has experienced rapid expansion. It reached 100 Gbps in 2016, 500 Gbps in 2018, 1 Tbps in 2020, 2 Tbps in 2022, 3 Tbps in 2023, and 4 Tbps in 2024. Today, NAPAfrica is the fastest-growing IXP on the continent and is in the top 7 globally 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,” the exchange stated.
Currently, NAPAfrica has 2,244 physical connected points and a total connected capacity of 41.5 terabits. Several key factors have driven its expansion, including:
- Strategic locations in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg, positioning it in three of Africa’s major Internet traffic hubs.
- Teraco data centres, where NAPAfrica is physically hosted, provide direct interconnections with ISPs, CDNs, cloud providers, and enterprises.
- Presence of global tech giants, including Akamai, Amazon, Cloudflare, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Netflix.
- Free peering and cost efficiency, enabling ISPs and content providers to lower transit costs while improving performance.
- An expanding peering community, with over 40 new peers added in the past year, including Mimecast, Fortinet, and Tencent.
- 400Gbps interconnect options, a first for Africa, meet increasing bandwidth demands.
- Support for local and regional networks, ensuring African traffic remains within the continent to reduce latency and costs.
- Boosted subsea cable connectivity, leveraging South Africa’s role as a landing point for cables like 2Africa, ACE, EASSy, Equiano, METISS, SAT3/SAFE, Seacom, and WACS.
- Rising mobile and broadband usage is fueling demand for video streaming, gaming, and cloud services.
- Network visibility and performance optimization, powered by the Kentik Network Observability platform, helps members gain critical insights and optimize 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,” the exchange stated. “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.”
Andrew Owens, Interconnection and Peering Lead at Teraco, had attributed data-hungry applications, enterprise use of cloud and growing demand for video as the key drivers behind NAPAfrica’s success: “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,” he said.
