Speaking at a three-day African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF), MainOne CEO, Funke Opeke said Africa's leading internet players exchange traffic, noting that this significantly lowers costs and improve performance.

In a recent press statement issued by the company, Opeke said Africa needs to retain more local traffic within the continent to drive more value from the Internet, as reported by CIO East Africa.

"This can be achieved by leveraging robust Internet Exchange Points and access via local interconnection points and local data centres which provide a platform for different networks to directly interconnect with other operators and exchange traffic, guaranteeing lower bandwidth costs, quicker access to more content providers and carriers and lower latency for local markets," she added.

According to CIO, AfPIF, which is an initiative of the Internet Society, "focused on developing Internet interconnection and traffic exchange opportunities where the West African Internet service provider reiterated the importance of Internet traffic domiciliation as a key requirement for growing the Internet ecosystem in Africa."

During her keynote address titled Vision 80/20 by 2020, which approached the goal set by AfPIF to route 80% of Africa's Internet traffic on the continent by the year 2020, Opeke examined the internet landscape in Africa and rued the current ecosystem of routing over 80% of the internet traffic from Nigeria abroad, incurring expensive transit costs and increasing service latency.

She explained that until a few years ago, internet capacity in Africa was low with few high-speed networks and data centres to provide users with the connectivity and content they desired.

According to her, this narrative is changing, as Africa's growing fibre network density and increase in world-class data centres makes it much easier for content providers and OTT operators to host and serve data locally.

Opeke also shared the company's strategy towards deepening regional integration and digital transformation of West Africa with submarine access to data centres in Lagos and Accra interconnecting all major operators, a new data centre coming up in Sagamu, Nigeria, and its intent to extend its submarine cable to Cote D'Ivoire.