ARC Telecoms champions open peering with NAPAfrica

ARC Telecoms has committed to open peering by establishing a connection at NAPAfrica, becoming the first business-focused telecoms company in SA to actively back this important initiative. Open peering at NAPAfrica allows Internet users - especially the price-sensitive small and medium business sector - to benefit from lower costs and greater network flexibility.

NAPAfrica has interconnect nodes in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, and is a recent addition to SA's Internet infrastructure. It provides an alternative to the paid-for Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX) that has been the only IP interconnect point in SA since commercial peering started in 1996.

Open peering allows ISPs of any size to interconnect freely, reducing costs for their customers, increasing network redundancy and routing flexibility, and reducing the sometimes comically complicated zig-zag routing that voice and data traffic takes to get from point A to point B.

“ARC has grown quickly from its start-up days challenging the old guard in the business telecoms space. Through organic growth and strategic partnerships, we've grown into a substantial business, but are still innovators at heart. We were not happy with the current peering and transit regime, and decided to support the NAPAfrica initiative,” says Steve Briggs, CEO of ARC Telecoms.

“While international bandwidth prices are falling steadily, local interconnect costs have not. NAPAfrica is the start of a truly free and open peering regime in this country, which is crucial to SA's ability to regain some measure of competitiveness in communications costs.”

As a telecoms provider that both leases capacity on other operator's networks as well as building its own intra-city links, ARC's presence at NAPAfrica increases the number of paths that a mesh of networks create to make the SA telecoms system more resilient, faster and better.

“We are still in a position in South Africa where one critical link going down can cause the 'brown-outs' that plague our telecoms environment,” explains Briggs. “More peering by more telecoms players gives safety in numbers, as well as broadening the scope for new generation services such as cloud applications, which are so attractive to SMEs. Medium enterprises make up the lion's share of our economy and we believe that peering at NAPAfrica will allow us to provide better solutions for this important market. It is time South Africa followed the best-practice peering regimes in the rest of the world.”

“Teraco is hosting the NAPAfrica peering points in its Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban data centres. With the greatest carrier diversity in Africa, Teraco's clients have complete freedom of choice. NAPAfrica welcomes ARC to the fast growing peering community,” says Lex van Wyk, MD of Teraco Data Environments.