NAPAfrica, the internet exchange point housed in Teraco’s data centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, has reached a new milestone: 5Tbit/s in traffic across its platform.
Internet exchange points improve the efficiency and reliability of global internet services by reducing latency for services that are cached locally, like streaming content, and serve as alternative routing pathways when disruptions in undersea cable infrastructure occur.
“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 company said in a statement on Tuesday.
Exponential
Traffic flowing through NAPAfrica has grown exponentially since it first peaked at 100Gbit/s in 2016. It took only two years for a fivefold increase in traffic to take place, with 2018 levels breaching the 500Gbit/s mark.
Three years later, in 2021, traffic had quadrupled to 2Tbit/s – doubling again in the next two years to reach 4Tbit/s in 2023. According to the company, traffic breached the 5Tbit/s mark for the first time last month.
Read: How South Africa’s internet exchanges are boosting African connectivity
To put that number in perspective, it’s the equivalent of transferring more than 130 000 MP3 songs over the network every second. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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