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Johannesburg - The continent of Africa has the world’s fastest growing levels of internet bandwidth capacity.
This is according to TeleGeography’s Global Internet Geography research which studied levels of bandwidth growth between 2011 and 2015.
Global internet capacity growth has slowed from 41% in 2011 to 31% in 2015, said TeleGeography.
African internet bandwidth, meanwhile, grew 41% between 2014 and 2015 and 51% compounded over the last five years to reach 2.9Tbps.
“New cable builds on the east and west coasts of Africa, including ACE, SEACOM, EASSy, WACS, and others, along with new terrestrial networks, have greatly increased available capacity in the Sub-Saharan region,” said TeleGeography senior analyst Patrick Christian.
“Meanwhile, content is moving to Africa as CDN (content delivery network) services emerge and Google Global Cache servers are installed, tempering demand for long-haul capacity,” said Christian.
However, the continent is also being affected by slower global growth when it comes to capacity.
“Despite the varying pace of new deployments, internet capacity growth has slowed in all regions over the past five years,” said Telegeography.
“This trend has been especially apparent in Africa. Despite the continent recording strong capacity growth between 2011 and 2015, it was a far cry from the 93% compound annual growth rate seen between 2006 and 2010,” the researchers added.
The researchers further said that between 2011 and 2015, internet bandwidth connected to countries in sub-Saharan Africa grew at 66% per year. In North Africa, this metric grew at 43% per year.
Other findings of the study indicated that Oceania saw the second fastest growth rate of 47% per year between 2011 and 2015 to reach 2.1Tbps while Latin America and the Middle East each grew 44% per year to 20.6Tbps and 8.4Tbps respectively.
Meanwhile, growth in Europe and the US and Canada was at 33% compounded annually for the period.
