Short answer
Most South African traffic should not leave the country. Because FirstNet operates its own Autonomous System with direct peering at the major local exchanges, NAPAfrica, JINX, CINX and DINX, traffic between you and local users, banks, platforms and services stays in South Africa instead of hairpinning offshore.
In detail
Hairpinning is when traffic between two local parties travels via an overseas route and back, adding distance and latency and exposing domestic traffic to international routing problems. Local peering avoids it, which:
- Shortens the path and lowers latency
- Keeps performance more consistent for local applications, voice and payments
- Reduces dependence on international capacity for domestic traffic
- Pairs with FirstNet business fibre, which is uncontended on local (on-net) traffic
FirstNet's own Autonomous System (AS328366) means these are FirstNet's peering relationships, not a resale of someone else's routes, and its NAPAfrica peering covers Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
For traffic that must go international, FirstNet adds multi-peer transit at global hubs including LINX London, New York, Frankfurt and Singapore, and capacity on seven or more undersea cables with automatic rerouting.
Source: FirstNet National Footprint & Global Reach service page →
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