South Africa’s largest internet exchange point (IXP), NAPAfrica, is now the seventh largest such facility globally, having topped 4.5Tbit/s in peering traffic.
NAPAfrica, which is owned and operated by data centre company Teraco, said the spike in traffic – it’s up by 500Gbit/s in a year – is due to growth in the peering community, with new additions Mimecast, Fortinet and Tencent joining the likes of Akamai, Cloudflare, Meta Platforms, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Netflix.
“NAPAfrica has expanded its peering community by over 40 peers over the last year to 652 unique organisations,” Teraco said in a statement on Monday.
“Based in Teraco’s data centres in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg … the exchange crossed the 4Tbit/s mark in November 2023 and has since expanded to support a diverse and ever-growing network of local and global peers,” said Teraco interconnection and peering head Andrew Owens.
It has also added 400Gbit/s interconnect options, catering to large content companies and cloud service providers.
It is introducing the Kentik Network Observability platform, too, a tool that provides insights into network performance. “With Kentik, peering managers, network engineers and security teams can better manage traffic, optimise performance and predict capacity needs, which results in even smoother content delivery and improved network resilience,” Teraco said.
Read: INX-ZA peering comes to NTT Data’s Joburg data centre
NAPAfrica is now hosting regional cache servers, enhancing content delivery. It also now hosts Netflix Open Connect cache servers in Cape Town and Durban. “By reducing the distance data must travel, this initiative enables faster load times for local audiences.” — © 2024 NewsCentral Media
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