Africa has spent the past decade building the visible layers of the internet: subsea cables, terrestrial fiber, Internet Exchange Points, data centers, cloud points of presence and national broadband plans. But Brazil offers a reminder that digital infrastructure is not only about cables and capacity. It is also about how many networks are visible, independently routed and able to exchange traffic locally. With more than 9,000 delegated ASNs, a national internet exchange system spanning dozens of metropolitan areas, and a coordinated ecosystem linking policy, training, number resources and peering, Brazil has built the kind of routing depth Africa still lacks. The lesson is not that Africa should copy Brazil. It is that Africa’s next digital infrastructure upgrade may depend less on laying more pipes and more on making its networks visible.
Brazil has built one of the world’s most dynamic national routing ecosystems with about 9,085 ASNs as of June 22, 2026, equal to nearly 64% of all ASNs delegated in the LACNIC region. This success came from policy backing, community mobilisation and practical execution.
Brazil alone has more than three times Africa’s roughly 2,800 assigned ASNs.
The lesson is not that Africa can copy Brazil mechanically. Brazil is one country, with one national market, one language, a large domestic economy and a mature internet governance structure. Africa is 54 countries, with fragmented regulation, uneven infrastructure, multiple languages, weaker cross-border routing and very different levels of digital maturity. But Brazil shows that ASN adoption is not simply an organic technical outcome. It can be shaped by policy, institutions, incentives and ecosystem design.
An ASN is a network’s routing identity on the internet. It allows a network to be recognised, reached and routed independently. In the WAPF session, Temitope Osunrinde, Executive Director, Africa Hyperscalers, described ASNs as “identity numbers for networks online,” adding that they allow networks to be “recognised, reached and routed across the internet.” The problem, he noted, is that ASN adoption in Africa remains concentrated among ISPs and infrastructure companies, while many banks, universities, government systems and enterprise networks still depend heavily on upstream providers for routing, visibility and redundancy.
Brazil’s model points in the opposite direction: more networks visible, more networks interconnected and more networks able to participate directly in the internet economy.
A major part of that story is institutional. Brazil’s internet ecosystem is anchored by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, CGI.br, and its executive arm, NIC.br. NIC.br is responsible for operating the .br domain, allocating Autonomous System Numbers and IPv4 or IPv6 addresses in the country through Registro.br, running security incident response through CERT.br, producing internet statistics through Cetic.br and supporting infrastructure projects such as IX.br.
Brazil connected governance to execution. CGI.br provides strategic coordination and a multistakeholder governance model, while NIC.br delivers practical infrastructure, statistics, security, training and number-resource services. In other words, the system does not stop at policy papers. It gives the internet community tools, institutions and platforms to act.
The most visible result is IX.br, Brazil’s national internet exchange system. In 2024, NIC.br described IX.br as the largest set of Internet Exchange Points in the world, with 36 IXPs across metropolitan areas in all five regions of Brazil. IX.br was created to provide infrastructure for direct interconnection between the Autonomous Systems that make up the Brazilian internet, helping reduce costs and improve performance.
By 2026, IX.br had expanded further. NIC.br said IX.br was present in 39 metropolitan areas, with approximately 3,800 participating Autonomous Systems and around 7,000 connections. Its aggregated internet traffic hit a record 50 Tbit/s, driven by content and digital services.
Brazil did not only encourage networks to obtain ASNs. It gave those ASNs places to meet, exchange traffic, reach content and become economically useful.
Africa’s challenge is that too many networks remain hidden behind larger providers. Behu Abba Bryce, Stakeholder Development Manager, AFRINIC, told the WAPF session that many companies, banks, universities and institutions still obtain connectivity through ISPs rather than managing their own number resources. He pointed to low awareness of the Regional Internet Registry system, limited technical capacity, eligibility concerns and the persistent myth that private addresses or NAT automatically make organisations safer.
Brazil’s experience suggests that these barriers can be reduced through a deliberate ecosystem programme. NIC.br has not only allocated resources; it has also invested in education, tooling and visibility. In 2020, NIC.br said Brazil had approximately 8,000 Autonomous Systems, including internet and content providers, universities, banks, government agencies and other institutions. It was actively encouraging those ASNs to register with PeeringDB so other networks could find and interconnect with them. NIC.br supported the process through training courses, events, Portuguese-language materials and local support.
That detail is important for Africa. Getting an ASN is only the first step. Networks also need to be discoverable, technically competent, peering-ready and connected to the right facilities. Brazil treated interconnection as an ecosystem problem, not merely as a registry transaction.
The country’s provider base also helps explain the result. Cetic.br’s TIC Providers 2024 survey estimated 11,853 active internet access providers in Brazil, based on data collected between September 2024 and April 2025. It also found that 72% of providers offered IPv6 to customers, up from 64% in 2022 and 40% in 2020, while 34% reported participating in IX.br. Providers cited improved service quality and access to content distribution networks as major reasons for joining IX.br.
Brazil therefore shows a reinforcing cycle. A broad ISP base creates more potential ASN holders. More ASNs create more visible networks. More visible networks strengthen IXPs. Stronger IXPs attract CDNs and content. Better local content improves service quality and lowers cost. Lower cost and better performance increase adoption.
Africa has parts of this cycle, but not enough of it at scale.
Carl Aniambossou, Chief Executive Officer of Sud Telecoms, made the visibility problem clear during the WAPF panel. He said that when major content providers and CDNs evaluate a market, they often look at the number of active networks. In practice, that means looking at ASNs. If a country has very few ASNs, it can appear smaller than it really is, even where the population and digital demand are significant.
This is where Brazil’s lesson becomes strategically important. ASN density is not just a technical metric. It is a market signal.
A country with more ASNs tells cloud providers, CDNs and infrastructure investors that there are more independently operated networks to interconnect with, more routing policies, more edge demand and more potential customers for local caches and exchange services. A country with few ASNs may still have millions of users, but if those users sit behind a small number of upstream providers, the market can look thinner than it is.
That is already a problem in parts of Africa. The continent has expanded subsea cable capacity, terrestrial fiber, Internet Exchange Points, cloud points of presence and data center capacity. Yet many large traffic-generating institutions — banks, universities, public agencies, hospitals, research networks and enterprises — remain absent from the routing table as independent actors. The result is an ecosystem where real demand exists but is not always visible to global infrastructure players.
Olawale Owoeye, Chief Executive Officer, Cedarview Communications, argued that the cost of this invisibility is practical. Speaking about Nigerian universities, he said poor routing makes internet access more expensive for the wider community. If universities routed traffic properly and became more visible to IXPs and cache providers, content could be placed closer to users, transport costs would fall and local internet performance would improve.
Brazil’s IX.br model supports that logic. NIC.br says IX.br enables direct interconnection between networks, reduces costs and improves performance. The OpenCDN initiative extends the same principle into content distribution by placing cache servers in partner data centers across regions and connecting them to IX.br exchanges. NIC.br says this shortens the distance to the end user, improves stability and reduces operational costs.
This is the infrastructure Africa needs more of: not only more cables, but more visible networks; not only more data centers, but more local exchange; not only more users, but more institutions with routing autonomy.
The policy lesson is not heavy-handed regulation. Ghislain Nkeramugaba, IXP Development Expert at the Internet Society, warned during the WAPF discussion that governments should not try to do everything. Instead, he argued for precise intervention: digitise public services, create real demand for digital platforms, improve physical addressing and support the enabling conditions that make digital services useful.
Brazil’s model aligns with that idea. It is not simply a government mandate. It is a coordinated ecosystem in which a multistakeholder body sets direction, a specialised institution executes, a national IXP system provides interconnection, data is collected, training is delivered and the private sector scales services.
Africa can adapt five practical lessons.
Countries need national ASN and IPv6 adoption programmes that target more than ISPs. Banks, universities, data centers, government digital platforms, hospitals, research networks, fintech infrastructure companies and large enterprises should be treated as candidates for independent number resources where their scale and operational needs justify it.
Regulators and internet communities should connect ASN adoption to national cloud, data sovereignty and digital public infrastructure policies. If governments want sensitive data hosted locally, then the networks serving that data must be visible, resilient and locally routed.
Africa needs more training and myth-busting. Bryce’s point about the “myth of public addresses” is central. Hiding behind Tier 1 providers is not a substitute for security architecture. Enterprises need to understand that public addressing, ASNs and BGP can be managed securely with the right policies, filtering, monitoring and incident response.
IXPs must become more useful to enterprise and public-sector networks. Brazil’s IX.br succeeded because it became a practical platform for direct interconnection, content access and regional decentralisation. African IXPs need more participants, more route servers, more data center integration, more CDN engagement and better outreach beyond traditional ISPs.
Africa needs better visibility tools. NIC.br’s PeeringDB campaign shows the value of helping networks become discoverable. African ASNs should not only exist in registry databases; they should be visible in peering databases, exchange member lists and interconnection platforms where cloud and content providers make decisions.
The final lesson is scale. During the WAPF session, one audience member mentioned Nigeria’s IPv6 Forum, inaugurated by the Nigerian Communications Commission in April 2026, with a plan to train 50 engineers in partnership with AFRINIC. Osunrinde responded that Africa should be thinking beyond dozens of engineers: it needs hundreds and thousands.
That is the Brazil point. Brazil did not become a reference case by treating routing as a niche technical matter. It turned interconnection into national infrastructure.
Africa’s ASN problem is not simply that there are too few numbers. It is that too many real networks are not visible enough, autonomous enough or interconnected enough to reflect the continent’s digital demand. Brazil shows that this can change when policy, institutions, training, IXPs, local content and provider ecosystems are made to reinforce one another.
Africa does not need to replicate Brazil. But it should study the principle behind the Brazilian model: build the institutions that make networks visible, give them places to exchange traffic, support them with training and governance, and make interconnection part of national digital infrastructure strategy.
The result would not just be more ASNs. It would be a more legible, resilient and investable African internet.
