Cape Town’s emergence as a critical digital gateway for Africa continues to gain momentum, driven by growing interconnection demand and ongoing infrastructure investment. The recent expansion of the Cape Town Internet Exchange (CINX), operated by the Internet Exchange Association of South Africa, into Teraco’s CT2 facility reflects a broader industry shift toward distributed, resilient peering environments, further reinforcing the city’s role as a strategic connectivity hub.
Against this backdrop, NAPAfrica has strengthened its collaboration with the South African Network Operators Group (ZANOG), a community of network engineers and operators focused on advancing the development of a more resilient and locally optimised internet ecosystem.
At the heart of this collaboration is a shared commitment to the “good of the internet”, a community-led approach to improving access, resilience, and performance for networks and end users.
Through this partnership, ZANOG has deployed a new community-driven cache and compute cluster at Teraco’s CT2 facility in Cape Town. Enabled by infrastructure support – including space within a “good of the internet” cabinet and cross-connects to key cache-fill partners – the deployment is connected to NAPAfrica and the newly expanded CINX platform, creating a highly interconnected, redundant environment.
“This marks the latest evolution of a model first introduced by ZANOG in Durban in 2018, where local caching initiatives were established to bring content closer to users historically underserved by major content deployments. Following its success, the model was extended to Cape Town, with Teraco’s CT2 data centre representing the third major installation,” says ZANOG’s Donald Jolley.
The initiative is designed to keep traffic local – within cities, countries, and the broader region – reducing reliance on long-distance transit and improving overall network efficiency. By enabling content to be served from Cape Town rather than remote locations such as Johannesburg or international hubs, networks benefit from lower latency, reduced costs, and a vastly improved user experience.
“This is ultimately about community and collaboration,” says Andrew Owens, Teraco Interconnection and Peering Lead. “While the infrastructure is important, the real goal is to build a stronger, more resilient internet that prioritises redundancy, diversity of routes, and local access to content.”
The deployment also reinforces industry best practices around resilience, encouraging network operators to maintain multiple connections across different locations and data centres. With presence now spanning Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, the initiative supports a more distributed and fault-tolerant internet architecture in South Africa.
In addition to cached content, the CT2 installation provides foundational infrastructure for broader community use cases, including open-source software mirrors and other shared services. The environment is designed to evolve over time, supporting additional community-led projects such as distributed datasets and internet measurement repositories.
A key milestone within this deployment is the activation of a major global content cache node in Cape Town, further enhancing the city’s ability to serve high-demand content locally. This development represents a significant step forward in strengthening Cape Town’s position as a digital hub and improving service delivery to end users across the region.
NAPAfrica, which surpassed 6Tbps of peak traffic in November 2025, continues to play a central role in enabling these ecosystems by providing open, scalable peering platforms. Through its collaboration with ZANOG, it is extending these benefits beyond South Africa’s borders, empowering regional communities with the tools, infrastructure, and knowledge needed to grow.
Teraco’s support in enabling this initiative – through infrastructure, interconnection, and collaboration – highlights the importance of partnerships in advancing Africa’s digital future.
As demand for digital services continues to rise, this partnership underscores a clear message: building a better internet is not just about infrastructure, but about community – working together to create a more resilient, accessible and locally empowered digital ecosystem.
