KeyCDN Launches New POP in South Africa

By Cody Arsenault

Updated on January 15, 2023

It's always an exciting time when we can announce that we're expanding our network to a new region. That's why today we're excited to announce that we're establishing our presence in Africa with a new point of presence (POP) in Johannesburg, South Africa! The new POP is now in production and has been automatically added to all existing Zones.

POP in Johannesburg extends content delivery to South Africa

Extending content delivery to South Africa has been on our radar for quite some time and we're happy to say that we're now present in the largest city of South Africa.

Previously, we didn't have any POP locations in the continent of Africa, therefore, all visitors from Africa were delivered content by surrounding POPs. However, now that we have a presence in the largest city within the country of South Africa, visitors will see an even further reduction in latency, thus resulting in better load times.

As of 2022, South Africa alone had a population of over 60.6 million people, covers an area of 1,221,037 square kilometers, is the largest country in Southern Africa and the 25th largest in the world. As for Johannesburg, it is one of the 50 largest urban areas in the world and has an estimated population of 6.2 million.

Growth of Internet in South Africa

South Africa is currently experiencing a boom in Internet access. In fact, South Africa is one of the most technologically advanced countries in Africa and produces over 60% of the continent's Internet traffic. The penetration rate of Internet in Africa isn't as high as other regions, however, is steadily rising. According to Statista, in 2022, the number of mobile Internet users in South Africa was nearly 50.7 million. This represents around 78.6 percent of the South African population accessing the Internet via a mobile device. This share is expected to rise to over 90 percent by the end of 2026.

The majority of Internet users in South Africa are mobile users, therefore, making it extremely important to provide faster content delivery. As cellular networks typically aren't as fast as fixed lines, providing a method to access content from a nearby server can drastically help reduce latency.

Here are some additional statistics about the usage and growth of the Internet in South Africa.

The primary uses of Internet in South Africa breaks down as follows: communication (31%), social networking (24.9%), information (23.7%), entertainment (22.1%)
Mobile Internet users are expected to keep increasing due to lower associated costs. By 2021, 90% of total Internet access is expected to be mobile
There are various cable systems either being proposed or under construction to help further advance South Africa's Internet infrastructure.

How to check if content is delivered from South Africa

Each POP adds the HTTP response header X-Edge-Location to all assets delivered via KeyCDN. In this case, the Johannesburg's POP's identifier is zajo. The first two letters stand for the country TLD, while the 3rd and 4th letters are for the city. You can quickly check the response headers using Chrome DevTools, a speed test tool, or a simple curl command like the one below:

curl -I https://www.keycdn.com/img/example.jpg
HTTP/2 200
server: keycdn-engine
date: Wed, 15 Jun 2022 07:02:41 GMT
content-type: image/jpeg
content-length: 195025
last-modified: Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:06:27 GMT
vary: Accept-Encoding
etag: "5f0ffc73-2f9d1"
expires: Wed, 22 Jun 2022 07:02:41 GMT
cache-control: max-age=604800
x-cache: HIT
x-edge-location: zajo
access-control-allow-origin: *
accept-ranges: bytes

Check the South Africa POP status

It's extremely important to us that we maintain a near 100% uptime rate to ensure that your content is always properly delivered from the nearest POP location. If you are experiencing any issues with the new POP in Johannesburg, or any other POP, check our status page to verify if we are performing any scheduled maintenance or open a support request with us directly.

What's next?

We are constantly working on releasing new features and expanding our global network. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements near the end of 2017 and into 2018. If you would like to request a POP in a certain location or a new feature please let us know.

Happy content delivery!