THIS IS NAPAFRICA

‘Napafrica is the most exciting thing on the internet,’ says Sanderson. Napafrica is a neutral, layer 2 internet exchange (IX) point, located within Teraco. Instead of costly multiple direct links to different providers, a single peering point allows multiple networks and internet service providers (ISPS) to interconnect using an exchange environment.

You bring your content and that is distributed to everybody connected. If you want to pick up content, you go there, choose the content, and take it back.

‘The difference,’ Mccann says, ‘is we’re neutral; we don’t charge for that. Our core focus is space, power, cooling, security and (as a value-added service), we give everyone access to Napafrica.

‘So it helps with the distribution strategy from a content perspective. From a network perspective, it reduces costs and improves the service to the end user.

‘Napafrica has been so successful and is the largest exchange on the continent. Right now, there are 305 networks connected on to the exchange, doing 300 gigs of peering traffic.’

On the interconnection side, Teraco runs more than 12 000 interconnects between clients, growing at about 300 physical cables every month, while Napafrica has become the eighth-largest internet exchange in the Asia Middle East Africa (AMEA) region in a very short space of time.