Teraco has announced that Africa’s largest Internet Exchange Point (IXP), NAPAfrica, has reached a landmark with 1 Terabit per second (Tbps) of peak traffic. According to Andrew Owens, Manager of Interconnection & Peering at Teraco, this is not only a significant milestone for the exchange, but also for the continent.

“The NAP Africa members, including global content and cloud providers, over 250 telecommunication providers, managed service providers and a growing enterprise base, are the driving force behind achieving this momentous goal,” says Owens.

Launched in 2012, NAPAfrica first recorded traffic of 532Mbps. Eight years later the exchange has reached 1Tbps, showing an impressive 1884 X growth. The exchange started with 5 members and today has in excess of 440 unique ASNs connected from across the world, including 26 African countries: “In a relatively short space of time NAPAfrica has become a significant contributor to the Internet ecosystem within Africa. This was one of our ultimate goals, to be of value to our members and to sustainably develop the African Internet ecosystem” says Owens.

NAPAfrica’s recent growth has been driven by the uptake in networks and enterprises accessing key content and cloud. In addition to the general use of the Internet across Africa visiting popular sites such as Netflix, Facebook, YouTube and other key internet applications.

Of significance, says Owens, is the interest shown by South Africa’s neighbouring countries, all looking to connect via NAPAfrica: “Telcos in countries as far afield as Angola, Togo and the Democratic Republic of Congo have joined the exchange. NAPAfrica has become the Internet hub for Sub-Saharan Africa.”

“More recently, the exchange has also seen a growing trend of enterprises and banks joining NAPAfrica to leverage its efficient and cost-effective access to content and cloud operators” says Owens.