Nigeria’s home web visitors has hit a report excessive of 1 terabit per second — sufficient to stream over 200,000 high-definition movies on the identical time— pushed by a surge in video consumption throughout platforms like Fb, TikTok, and YouTube, based on the Web Trade Level of Nigeria (IXPN). The milestone, reached in March 2024, marks the very best visitors stage since its inception in 2007.
This progress highlights Nigeria’s emergence as Africa’s second-largest web hub and displays a broader development towards native content material supply, which helps to decrease prices and enhance speeds in one of many continent’s most linked nations. The visitors now routed by way of IXPN—a key digital infrastructure that permits web service suppliers and content material platforms to change knowledge regionally—alerts a shift from reliance on worldwide bandwidth to domestically hosted providers.
“1 terabit per second signifies that 1 million individuals can concurrently make cellphone calls and Zoom conferences,” IXPN CEO Muhammed Rudman mentioned at an occasion on Tuesday, April 22. “It additionally means 200,000 individuals can watch native movies or Netflix on the identical time. With out an web change level, this visitors would have been going out of Nigeria.”
Nigeria now ranks because the second-largest web change hub in Africa, behind solely South Africa, which handles over 4 terabits per second. Key to this progress is the rising demand for video content material.
As of early 2025, Nigeria has 38.7 million energetic Fb customers, 37.4 million TikTok customers, and 27 million YouTube customers, based on DataReportal. In October 2024 alone, YouTube reported a 55% year-on-year improve in watch time amongst Nigerian customers aged 18 and above, reaching greater than 30 million individuals. TikTok and Fb report comparable progress, with video content material persevering with to dominate utilization patterns. Most of this growing knowledge load is being routed regionally by way of IXPN.
When IXPN was launched in 2006 with operational actions kicking off in 2007, visitors ranges had been minimal—between 5 and 10 megabits per second—as a result of Nigerian suppliers depended closely on worldwide connections like SAT-3 or satellite tv for pc providers. With no native web change, most visitors needed to be routed overseas, which slowed down providers and elevated prices.
Issues started to shift in 2009 when Google signaled its curiosity in peering with IXPN. The precise connection in 2011 proved transformative, growing visitors from underneath 20 Mbps to over 120 Mbps by 2012. This upward development continued quickly, hitting 600 Mbps inside a 12 months. By 2019, IXPN visitors had reached 126 gigabits per second, climbing additional to 900 Gbps by December 2024. The most recent milestone of 1 Tbps in March 2024 highlights how far Nigeria’s web ecosystem has come.
This surge in web visitors has been pushed not solely by rising consumer demand but additionally by vital infrastructure investments, significantly the growth of native knowledge facilities and direct interconnection agreements with international content material giants like Google, Fb, Microsoft, Amazon, Starlink, TikTok, and Netflix, all of which now peer with the Web Trade Level of Nigeria (IXPN).
“A few of these corporations are already exchanging between 10% and 30% of their visitors regionally, with a couple of reaching as much as 70%,” mentioned Rudman. “Think about an ISP with 1,000 subscribers consuming 1 gigabit of information. If 700 megabits of that visitors is routed by way of IXPN and solely 300 goes to the upstream supplier, the price financial savings are substantial.”
By localising content material and protecting extra knowledge inside Nigeria’s borders, these partnerships are enhancing web speeds, lowering latency, and making broadband extra reasonably priced for thousands and thousands of customers. It’s a win-win for service suppliers and customers alike,— one which alerts Nigeria’s accelerating shift towards a extra self-reliant web ecosystem.
