Surge in Africa's internet bandwidth capacity
Surge in Africa's internet bandwidth capacity
According to TeleGeography's Global Internet Geography research Africa's bandwidth has grown by 51% annually, in the last five years.
This is against global trends where the internet bandwidth growth has slowed down from 41% in 2011 to 31% in 2015. This shows that the internet penetration is slowly being saturated.
"African Internet bandwidth grew 41% between 2014 and 2015, and 51% compounded annually over the last five years, to reach 2.9Tbps," the report said.
"New cable builds on the east and west coasts of Africa, including ACE, SEACOM, EASSy, WACS, and others, along with new terrestrial networks, have greatly increased available capacity in the Sub-Saharan region," said Patrick Christian, TeleGeography senior analyst.
"Meanwhile, content is moving to Africa as CDN services emerge and Google Global Cache servers are installed, tempering demand for long-haul capacity."
The report also said that internet bandwidth connected to countries in Sub-Saharan Africa rose at a much faster rate than those in North African countries.
However, between 2006 and 2010, Africa had a capacity growth of 93%. This sharp curve is due to the beginning of internet adoption across the continent, despite the low numbers then.