NAPAfrica announced it has achieved the target throughput of 20Gbps with more than 180 members across its locations in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg.
NAPAfrica’s efforts aim to stimulate the development of a neutral Internet exchange and reduce IP interconnection costs and complexity in sub-Saharan Africa. It also ensures that content is no longer sourced from Europe, but cached and available locally on the African continent.
The neutral Internet exchange model is now gaining popularity in sub-Saharan Africa. Before the launch of this service, 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 parent company of NAPAfrica.
As the only neutral facility in Africa, Teraco gives clients access to the largest community of local and global content, undersea cable operators, sub-Saharan carriers, ISP’s and cloud operators.
NAPAfrica’s community is currently 180 peers strong; Cloudfare, a content delivery network and domain name server (DNS) distributor, signed up in December 2014.
The benefits of connecting to NAPAfrica include 100 percent free peering: no membership or port fees; multi and bi-lateral peering arrangements; the most content and largest active peering community in Africa, the company said.
