FEATURE : INTERCONNECTION connected enterprises , including telecoms , financial services , e-commerce , logistics , and retail .
The city benefits from its enviable location at the southern tip of Africa and is the confluence point for major subsea cable systems such as Equiano , ACE , WACS and SAT-3 , SAFE . The abundance of subsea cables landing in Cape Town continues to gain momentum , with the 2AFRICA cable system landing expected soon .
CT2 has been designed to put sustainability first and minimise its environmental footprint . Incorporating state-of-the-art cooling designs with a closed-loop chilled water system that offers 100 % free air cooling . This design introduces industry PUEs , minimising energy consumption and reducing to zero water used in the ongoing cooling process .
CT2 is the latest expansion to Teraco ’ s growing datacentre platform . It increases the critical power load capacity at Teraco facilities to 185MW , which includes the Isando Campus JB1 , JB3 , JB5 , 70MW , Bredell Campus JB2 , JB4 , 64MW , Cape Town Campus CT1 , CT2 , 50MW , and Durban , 1MW .
NAPAfrica
NAPAfrica , Africa ’ s Internet exchange point and the sixth largest exchange globally announced a significant milestone in its growth journey . It surpassed 4Tbps , Terabits per second traffic milestone , confirming its position as the pivotal exchange for Internet traffic across the African continent .
NAPAfrica reached the 3Tbps traffic threshold in March 2023 , representing a 33 % growth in traffic volumes in under a year . This rapid traffic growth mirrors the increasing demand by users for content and cloud services . NAPAfrica also welcomed social media platform TikTok to its growing community .
South African players driving Internet exchanges and datacentre peering
Teraco
Teraco , is a carrier-neutral colocation provider in Africa with a resilient , vendor-neutral data environments in sub-Saharan Africa . With its datacentre infrastructure and network-dense ecosystems , Teraco forms a vital part of the African Internet ’ s backbone and is essential to the modern African enterprise ’ s digital transformation strategy .
Teraco is part-owned by Digital Realty , offering customers a global datacentre platform designed to enable digital businesses to scale within a highly connected data community across 300 + datacentres in 50 + metros and 27 countries on six continents , and a consortium of private equity investors , including Berkshire Partners and Permira .
Organisations working to accelerate their digital transformation use Teraco to scale their IT infrastructure dynamically , adopt hybrid multi-cloud architectures , and interconnect with strategic business partners within the Platform Teraco ecosystem of global and local clients .
Digital Realty
Digital Realty brings delivers datacentre , colocation , and interconnection solutions . PlatformDIGITAL , the company ’ s global datacentre platform , provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacentre Architecture , PDx solution methodology for efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges .
Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected communities that matter to them with a global datacentre footprint of 300 + facilities in 50 + metros across 27 countries on six continents .
Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of datacentre , colocation and interconnection solutions .
NAPAfrica
“ The presence of over 250 carriers and networks is the drawcard for content providers like TikTok to join the exchange ,” said Michele McCann , Head of Platforms at Teraco .
The continued investment into critical telecommunications infrastructure in Africa has contributed enormously to the growth of NAPAfrica , as has the continent ’ s demand for content and cloud services like Microsoft Azure and AWS .
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 . p
Established in 2012 , NAPAfrica has over 560 members actively peering and has grown to become Africa ’ s biggest Internet exchange , by the number of members , playing a pivotal role in transforming Africa ’ s Internet access and interconnection .
Home to global carriers , cloud providers , content delivery networks , CDNs , ISPs , Internet security , and gaming platforms , NAPAfrica is the continent ’ s largest aggregation point . In a world where the ease of interconnection , seamless peering arrangements , and platform reliability are essential , the NAPAfrica Internet exchange delivers .
NAPAfrica operates Internet exchange points within Teraco ’ s Cape Town , Durban , and Johannesburg data centres that service the Southern Africa region . The IXP ’ s founding goal is to help make Internet access more accessible for Africa .
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