Nigeria’s AfPIF moment: Will Nigeria finally keep its internet at home?

Muhammed Rudman, chief executive officer of Internet eXchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN)

In April 2025, the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) crossed a symbolic threshold: 1 terabit per second (Tbps) of peak domestic internet traffic.

For a country where, just 15 years ago, less than one percent of traffic was local, this achievement is both technical and symbolic. It shows that Nigeria’s internet is maturing, keeping more data at home, and edging toward a future where Africa’s digital economy is not routed through Europe or the Middle East.

The milestone comes just months before Lagos hosts the African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) in August 2025, the first time Nigeria will host the event. It sets the stage for a deeper question: can Nigeria and by extension, finally keep its internet at home?

The case for localisation

Today, almost 70 percent of Africa’s internet traffic still makes costly and inefficient detours overseas. A student’s online class might lag as the data bounces through London before returning to Lagos. A fintech app could time out mid-transaction because of latency. Enterprises pay more for bandwidth as packets traverse multiple jurisdictions. These inefficiencies slow growth, raise costs, and expose Africa’s data to geopolitical risks.

Muhammed Rudman, CEO of IXPN, has witnessed the transformation firsthand: “Fifteen years ago, about one percent of internet traffic was localized.”

Now, with IXPN among Africa’s top three exchanges, Nigeria is showing what is possible. Localising traffic means more than efficiency, it is about sovereignty, resilience, and unlocking opportunities for industries from streaming and gaming to telemedicine and e-governance.

Nigeria as a continental testbed

The comparison with global leaders is humbling but encouraging. Germany’s DE-CIX, the world’s largest internet exchange, recently celebrated 25 Tbps after three decades of growth. South Africa’s NAPAfrica is already above 5 Tbps. Nigeria, projected to hit 2 Tbps before the end of 2025, is accelerating fast.

That target is not accidental. IXPN’s plan to double capacity involves expanding neutral colocation footprints in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Kano to accommodate more peering nodes; Forging new partnerships with global content delivery networks (CDNs), hyperscalers, and cloud providers to bring workloads closer to Nigerian users; Strengthening enterprise adoption, encouraging banks, fintechs, media companies, and government agencies to route traffic locally and cross-border integration, by aligning routing strategies with Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and other West African peers to regionalise traffic flows.

If achieved, the 2 Tbps milestone would firmly establish Nigeria as one of Africa’s top interconnection hubs and signal to global platforms that Lagos is no longer just a regional waypoint but a continental anchor.

The AfPIF moment

AfPIF 2025 comes at an inflection point. On the surface, it is a gathering of network operators, data center executives, and IXP managers. In reality, it is a summit that will help define how Africa connects, competes, and computes in the era of artificial intelligence (AI).

The demands of AI, real-time markets, and hyperscale cloud computing are clear: milliseconds matter, workloads must live close to users, and interconnection is now strategic infrastructure. IXPs are no longer just neutral meet-points, as they are sovereignty enablers, cost reducers, and innovation accelerators.

For Nigeria, hosting AfPIF is more than prestige. It is a chance to align regulators, cloud platforms, and data center operators around one goal: retaining African traffic in Africa. It is also a call to close gaps in data center capacity (less than 100 MW today compared to thousands in global hubs), forge cross-border interconnection with Ghana, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire, and expand training for the next generation of network engineers.

Royal Ibeh

Royal Ibeh is a senior journalist with years of experience reporting on Nigeria’s technology and health sectors. She currently covers the Technology and Health beats for BusinessDay newspaper, where she writes in-depth stories on digital innovation, telecom infrastructure, healthcare systems, and public health policies.

Source: Businessday.ng | Read Full Story…