Messaging

Deploy in ng-1a and the machine sits in Lagos, in the same city as most of the traffic it will ever serve. Nigeria makes that easy to reason about: 189.68 million active mobile subscriptions in May 2026, with MTN and Airtel together carrying about 86% of active lines and Globacom and T2 — the operator formerly branded 9mobile — behind them. Whichever of the four your customer is on, they are in Nigeria, and typical in-metro round trips here run around 4 ms.

Nigerian networks now hand traffic to each other in Nigeria. IXPN, the neutral national exchange founded in 2006 by the NCC, runs 13 points of presence across 7 states and more than 130 connected networks, with 400G-capable core switching at three Lagos sites; peak domestic traffic across it passed 1 Tbps in April 2025 and 2 Tbps by March 2026. Before it existed, two Nigerian networks exchanged packets by way of London — an intercontinental journey for a packet crossing one city.

Eight subsea systems come ashore in the country, Equiano landing on the Lagos coast in 2022 and 2Africa at Lekki, which is how Lagos became West Africa's arrival point for international capacity. Aim a request at Frankfurt or Virginia instead and that subsea path joins the critical route of every call the page makes, at typically around 110 to 125 ms before your application does any work. From Lagos, Accra and Nairobi typically sit further away in round-trip terms than London, because traffic between African networks still frequently transits Europe.

ke-1a in Nairobi and tz-1a in Dar es Salaam run on the same account and the same API, which makes a standby or a disaster-recovery plan a configuration rather than a second supplier. Make that call deliberately where personal data is involved: a copy of Nigerian personal data held abroad is a cross-border transfer under section 41 of the NDPA. Machine images and telemetry raise no such question.