TERACO’S NAPAFRICA INTERNET EXCHANGE IS THE WORLD’S SEVENTH LARGEST

Teraco is not the only player looking to capitalise on the growing use of cloud services and the internet. The company faces growing competition from technology and telecoms firms such as Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Dimension Data and Telkom that are all working to build and grow their own facilities and capacity.

International technology companies Amazon and Microsoft have also committed to large facilities in SA.

Hnizdo said Teraco has been able to double its data transfer capacity, or bandwidth, for its internet exchange in just more than a year, beyond what had been built up in the previous seven years. An internet exchange is a physical point through which internet-based companies, such as internet service providers (ISPs) and servers for online content, connect with each other.

“It took us seven years to reach 1 terabit per second throughput, but since March last year we’ve gone beyond 2 terabits per second, in just 15 months.”

Bandwidth, or throughput, is the average rate of data transfer through a communications path. In a cloud computing world in which organisations and individuals have to access data stored in data centres, transfer speed is paramount.

Under perfect conditions, up to 125GB, or 60 high-definition movies, could be downloaded per second at the speeds Hnizdo highlighted.

Teraco’s internet exchange, NAPAfrica, is the world’s seventh largest.

Teraco, which is backed by investors such as US private equity firm Berkshire Partners and UK-based investment firm Permira, has been on an aggressive expansion drive in recent years. Companies are increasingly wanting access to its centres to store and process large amounts of corporate data, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Increasing demand from “key content providers”, such as social media, search or streaming companies, has been another growth area for the company.