Teraco commits to boosting Africa’s Internet infrastructure

​Teraco has announced a crucial sponsorship to help boost Africa's Internet infrastructure.

The provider of resilient, carrier, cloud and vendor neutral data environments in South Africa will be providing colocation infrastructure to all 13 global root operators.

Teraco technical manager for Interconnection and Peering, Andrew Owens says that the company made the decision to sponsor root operators in order to continue supporting the growth of the African Internet market.

"Root operators have been recognised as an important element of the Internet and in sponsoring colocation infrastructure, we hope to increase the number of root operators available within the continent," Owens says.

Owens asserts that the company invites all root operators to Teraco, helping to achieve its mission of building strong foundations of digital communities whilie improving Internet services throughout the continent.

"We are especially hoping that root operators such as Packet Clearing House (PCH), an international organisation responsible for providing operational support and security to critical Internet infrastructure, will join the Teraco community," says Owens.

According to Teraco, root operators are not widely understood – despite being a critical part of Internet infrastructure.

Owens breaks it down as a root name server is a name server for the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet, which directly answers requests for records in the root zone and answers other requests by returning a list of the authoritative name servers for the appropriate top-level domain (TLD).

This means root name servers are the first step in translating or resolving human readable host names into IP address that are used in communication between Internet hosts.

Under Teraco, Owens says root operators are able to access more than 280 unique ASN's and service multiple African countries through a single deployment within the Teraco facility in Johannesburg.

"We recoginse the support our community has given us over the years to grow Teraco and its Internet exchange, NAPAfrica," says Owens.

"We feel it's now time to do more than just fund NAPAfrica to help improve a user's Internet experience in Africa. We believe that sponsoring the needed infrastructure for root operators will further improve the African Internet experience.