The Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), Nigeria’s largest neutral internet exchange point, has welcomed FreePass Africa—Nigeria’s first Local Content Delivery Network (CDN)—as a member. This significant addition to IXPN proves its commitment to improving national internet infrastructure, lowering latency, improving content delivery and strengthening the digital ecosystem in Nigeria.
IXPN was formed in 2006 through the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and the Internet Service Providers Association of Nigeria (ISPAN) to help keep local traffic in Nigeria. IXPN is not only a connection point to over 100 connected networks; it is the technical backbone of Internet service resiliency in Nigeria—reducing international latencies of 900 ms to latencies of around 30 ms—especially in response to international backhaul disruptions and multiple network congestion events across Nigeria.
FreePass Africa’s Role
FreePass Africa is a carrier-neutral infrastructure provider of digital multimedia and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) content, enabling reliable and flexible content distribution, in a number of significant sectors, similar to the IXPN membership network sectors of broadcasting, streaming, logistics, education, health care, and gaming, direct for local audiences in Nigeria. FreePass offers scalable and highly configurable CDN services focusing on users’ ability to improve their local digital experiences, whether in urban or underserved areas.
The partnership was agreed to during a meeting at the Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) 2025 in Lagos, where both FreePass and IXPN were assured of their commitment to improve the quality of Nigeria’s internet infrastructure and improve the quality experience of internet users, especially in respect to international services. Driving Exceptional Digital Advantages
By integrating IXPN, FreePass Africa places its infrastructure in the center of Nigeria’s content exchanges. This ability to access will provide more efficient ways to use bandwidth, means cheaper transit costs, and means higher reliability in contexts that are already lagging behind in digital access.
FreePass Africa has a clear strategic vision—”connect Africa, one city at a time”—which promotes the idea of access points within all locations in Nigeria, and beyond. Traffic can remain local rather than being rerouted through the international backhaul, providing faster connections and higher redundancy.
Building Edge Capabilities across Key Industries
The FreePass Africa edge infrastructure platform can a have a strong impact on the most significant industries within Nigerian economy:
Healthcare: Enables low-latency telemedicine, remote diagnostics, and allows for some preparedness which will reduce regulation headaches.
Education: Allows real-time e-learn for remote communities, where services are easier to disrupt due to poor local connectivities.
Logistics: Better linkages to real-time tracking, supply chains communication, and coordinator points.
Gaming and Streaming: Satisfies high-bandwidth required with reduced jitters and faster content access.
Through the offering of these edge solutions, FreePass Africa is able to improve the lived realities where available infrastructure has fallen behind in advancing digital inclusion.
Momentum of Digital Infrastructure in Nigeria
The collaboration is an important leap in moving to a decentralised internet architecture within Nigeria. IXPN’s geographic agility and scalability in having multiple Points-of-Presence (PoPs), throughout Lagos and key geopolitical zones, becomes more immediately relevant in a place where IXPN is being recognized as West Africa’s regional IXP.
In a presentation by IXPN’s CEO at AfPIF 2025, he rightly commented that partnership such as these will better support the growing demand for local content, with the recognition that many global platforms are comfortable in Lagos (Meta and Google) but are not doing anything for Nigeria, and many others are hesitant moving forward, due to infrastructure costs and distribution. CDNs and IXPs can be strategically located throughout the country, which is needed to improve the potential for a broader deployment and better service.
Moving Towards a Collective Future
Overall, the IXPN–FreePass Africa partnership is supportive of the greater continental shift to local digital infrastructure being at the center of economic growth and innovation. The agreement complements many other individual and collective initiatives from the expansion of fibre footprint to ongoing decentralized data centres, it signals a time period where digital services are accessible and provide performance and redundancy.
This will create a ripple effect: reduce the prices of bandwidth, improved peering access, faster delivery times, more local content being hosted, and positive effect localized innovations that are created by Nigerians and for Nigerians.
Now that the partnership is formed, we are all waiting to see when this vision is realized: a next generation, directional internet, locally required, to be able to scale with the large ambitions of the future for Nigeria.