This is a turn up for the books. Telkom, through its newly formed Openserve wholesale and networks division, has announced it will peer with other operators and service providers through the neutral Internet exchange point, NAPAfrica.
NAPAfrica, which is located in each of Teraco’s data centre facilities in South Africa, provides a single peering point for multiple networks and Internet service providers to interconnect with each other to reduce bandwidth costs and improve network latency and performance.
The exchange has five of the largest content providers worldwide, including Netflix, Google and Akamai Technologies, and more than 280 members routing 80Gbit/s of traffic between them.
Teraco CEO Lex van Wyk welcomed the decision by Openserve, saying it will assist the Telkom-owned infrastructure provider to “deliver increased innovation and more choice, ultimately increasing broadband access”.
Openserve’s decision to peer is in keeping with the broader evolution of a deregulating market, Van Wyk said.
Telkom spun off its wholesale and networks division as Openserve in October. Openserve is meant to be independent of its parent, serving the entire telecommunications market in an “open and transparent” manner.
“Through this separation, we remove a critical stumbling block on our path to success,” Telkom CEO Sipho Maseko said at Openserve’s launch last year.
Telkom said at the time that the separation meant “a new era in the Telkom group as it prepares to welcome a more open-access environment and all the opportunities it offers”.
Van Wyk said NAPAfrica, which is owned by Teraco but which operates on a not-for-profit basis, is Africa’s largest Internet exchange point and is four times the combined size of all the continents’ other exchanges. It serves a number of countries in the region, including South Africa.
In a phone interview with TechCentral on Wednesday, Van Wyk said there has been a significant shift in approach to the rest of the market by Telkom and specifically Openserve. “The guys have plans to really make a difference now,” Van Wyk said of the company. — (c) 2016 NewsCentral Media