African technology companies are increasingly investing in international partnerships aimed at strengthening critical Internet infrastructure to match growing connectivity and fiber-optic deployment.South Africa is at the forefront, signing agreements with Swedish and American companies for provision of anycast-based domain name system services, expected to provide resiliency and redundancy for the .za top-level domain.The .za Domain Name Authority (ZADNA) has signed agreements with Netnod of Sweden and U.S.-based Packet Clearing House (PCH), mainly to galvanize resources against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.Netnod and its subsidiary, Autonomica, operate the Internet exchanges in Sweden and also work on Internet operations research, provide consultancy services around critical infrastructure and operate a number of common services. One such service is the i.root-servers.net service, one of the 13 DNS root name servers on the Internet.

"By using anycast technology from Netnod, we will have better resiliency and redundancy for the .za domain name service, as well as better performance for end-users," said Vika Mpisane, general manager of ZADNA. "The current agreement follows up on a similar agreement that Autonomica already has for co.za, which accounts for around 95 percent of .za domain names. This is good news for the stability of the .za namespace," Mpisane added.

South Africa has the most vibrant Internet industry in Africa with 600,000 domain names, out of the continent's total of less than 1 million domains. Netnod has 40 DNSNODE locations worldwide.

"With anycast service for .za, ZADNA joins the growing number of TLDs that use our DNSNODE anycast platform to gain better resilience and lower latency for their end-users," said Kurt Erik Lindqvist, CEO of Netnod.

Other African countries with a significantly lower number of Internet users and underdeveloped infrastructure are in the process of building networks, seeking to attract other countries to peer at exchange points. The Kenya Internet Exchange Point is expanding its reach in order to become the preferred peering point for ISPs (Internet service providers) in Eastern Africa. This will follow the steps taken by other IXPs like Amsterdam IX, which has become a regional exchange point, attracting ISPs from other countries.

"KIXP is positioned as a preferred peering location in Africa; this means inviting peering members from other locations in the EA region to peer at KIXP, resulting into a regional IXP," said Michuki Mwangi, CTO at KIXP.

Creating a regional IXP would require incorporation of a separate commercial entity, because most IXPs in the region are nonprofit and mainly serve the needs of local ISPs.

While the growth of connectivity numbers has raised awareness among government officials of the need to invest in critical infrastructure, regulatory challenges still exist.

"Cross-border interconnection and regulatory issues, lack of adequate terrestrial infrastructure to facilitate the interconnection and lack of many regional carriers are the main challenges," added Mwangi.

Even though East Africa has good infrastructure compared to countries in Central Africa, the emergence of regional carriers is yet to take place. Currently Kenya Data Networks is the only regional carrier.

Mwangi says that emergence of more regional carriers is likely to spur competition, the need for regional interconnection and transit/peering agreements.