Established in 2012, NAPAfrica's aim is to stimulate the development of a neutral internet exchange and reduce IP interconnection costs and complexity in sub-Saharan Africa. Its aim is also to ensure that content is no longer sourced from Europe, but cached and available locally on the African continent.
"The understanding around the benefits of a neutral internet exchange model has grown exponentially as a result of the NAPAfrica offering in sub-Saharan Africa. It is now a far more common and accepted model. Before its launch, the exchange market in sub-Saharan Africa was either a monopoly or non-existent, which never bodes well for pricing and service delivery," said Lex van Wyk, CEO of Teraco, the home of NAPAfrica.
Being based within the heart of Teraco's client communities and ecosystems has been a key driver for NAPAfrica's fast growth. As the only neutral facility in Africa, Teraco gives clients access to a community of local and global content, undersea cable operators, sub-Saharan carriers, ISPs and cloud operators.
Van Wyk said that the team has been steadfast in its commitment to growing the sub-Saharan internet exchange to becoming Africa's biggest and a recognised global player.
NAPAfrica's community is currently 180 peers strong; Cloudfare, a content delivery network and domain name server (DNS) distributor, signed up in December 2014. "Teraco has been a key partner in our expansion into the African continent. We selected Teraco for its robust platform, density of connectivity and ability to scale with the explosive growth of the CloudFlare service," said Joshua Motta, Special Projects, Cloudfare.
As further testament to the huge demand for content in sub-Saharan Africa: Akamai, one of the world's largest content delivery networks (CDN), has just undergone additional bandwidth upgrades to distribute more content locally.
The benefits of connecting to NAPAfrica include 100% free peering: no membership or port fees; multi and bi-lateral peering arrangements; the most content and largest active peering community in Africa.
"We are aggressively expanding our footprint in sub-Saharan Africa and remain confident that we will exceed 20Gbps within the next quarter," concluded van Wyk.
