4Tbps milestone as TikTok joins NAPAfrica

Increased investment by global cloud providers is driving wider availability of internet-based digital services across Africa with content providers and enterprises looking to expand into the continent and businesses committing to moving more of their functions to the cloud. As a result, firms are busy looking to find regional infrastructure providers and the latest example of this phenomenon is the arrival of global social media platform TikTok to the growing community of NAPAfrica.

Established in 2012, NAPAfrica has over 560 members from more than 50 countries actively peering and claims to be Africa’s leading internet exchange point (IXP), the continent’s largest aggregation point and the sixth largest exchange globally by number of members. NAPAfrica operates IXPs within the Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg datacentres of carrier-neutral colocation provider Teraco, the first provider of highly resilient, vendor-neutral data environments in sub-Saharan Africa.

With a stated founding goal of helping to improve internet access for Africa, the company sees itself as playing a pivotal role in transforming Africa’s internet access and interconnection market.

Home to global carriers, cloud providers, content delivery networks, ISPs, internet security, and gaming platforms, the company claims that in a world where ease of interconnection, seamless peering arrangements, and platform reliability are essential, its internet exchange delivers. It says enterprises are taking advantage of the benefits of peering by connecting with cloud deployments, networks, security providers, and content providers within the company’s ecosystem to move to a digital economy.

NAPAfrica says increased network demand to service remote users has driven the adoption of key cloud and security applications. These include Akamai, Amazon, Cloudflare, Microsoft and Zscaler.

NAPAfrica also announced a significant milestone in its growth by surpassing the 4Tbps traffic milestone, representing a 33% growth in traffic volumes in under a year. NAPAfrica reached the 3Tbps traffic threshold in March 2023.

“The presence of over 250 carriers and networks is the drawcard for content providers like TikTok…