South African neutral access Internet exchange peering service NAPAfrica achieved 200 Gb/s of traffic in July as a result of significant demand from neighbouring countries and sub-Saharan Africa, says data centre company Teraco Data Environments business development manager Michele McCann.

The service, hosted in Teraco’s vendor-neutral data centres, serves 270 unique networks and there are 90 000 unique routes on the exchange. It is the third-largest Internet exchange point in the southern hemisphere.

“The fact that the service is hosted in neutral data centre facilities built to global standards that provide high-level service guarantees and availability is attractive to many network service providers and content providers. Terrestrial fibre networks being expanded in Africa further boost the service’s growth prospects.”

Many of South Africa’s neighbouring countries do not have neutral data centre infrastructure that can provide similar services and it is easier and simpler for network service and content providers to open points of presence in the Teraco data centres. They can easily connect to various network operators, buy and sell products, and access simple interconnect services between countries such as Mauritius and Reunion, she explains.

Further supporting the growth of the exchange are hardware renewal cycles and a move to cloud platforms and services, as they provide simple and affordable interconnections and peering for companies to access their hosted business applications through various service providers.

McCann notes that the presence of multinational content provider companies in the data centre also provides direct access to global content for network service providers and their customers.

Additionally, the presence of global companies is an endorsement of the hosting environment’s service levels, she notes, and also prompts local companies and subscribers to adopt new Internet technologies, such as Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which the multinational firms are standardising on.

NAPAfrica enables clients to route IPv4 and IPv6 traffic, but helps business networks to migrate towards IPv6. It acts as a practical test-bed for network engineers and network operators, as it enables them to test IPv6 routing directly with other networks in a neutral data centre environment, while not affecting their end clients.

The peering service supports hybrid information technology strategies increasingly being adopted by businesses because one node in Teraco enables businesses to leverage global and local cloud services, as well as their own in-house resources, as their business strategy dictates.

Based on the growing demand for Internet communications and services on the continent and the presence of many international submarine telecommunications cables, the peering service expects demand to increase consistently and substantially in the foreseeable future, says McCann.

“We have invested in our hardware and systems to ensure that we can support critical infrastructure in multiple countries, and yet have not added any charges for peering services in addition to Teraco’s hosting charges,” she concludes.