Internet: Two Nigerians build a network to keep African traffic on the continent

When an internet user in Lagos or Nairobi opens a video, it often travels from a server located in Europe or North America. This is the detour that FreePass, a Lagos-based start-up founded by CEO Chimdi Chiezukwa and Lionel Orishane, wants to eliminate. According to Techpoint Africa, the company is installing cache servers—or "edge nodes"—directly into the continent's cell towers and data centers to store the most requested content locally.

Fewer kilometers, less data

The technical benefit is twofold: reducing latency and decreasing the amount of data consumed for the same content. On a continent where the price of a connection remains a major barrier to usage, this is as much an economic argument as it is a technological one.

The business model, dubbed ZeroRate CDN, reverses the burden: it is the broadcasters, streaming platforms, and online education providers that pay for delivery, not the internet user, who accesses the content without it being deducted from their data plan. Telecom operators, for their part, receive a share of the revenue. "A single integration" is enough to cover multiple networks and expand across the region, summarizes Lionel Orishane to Techpoint Africa, which sees this as the main barrier to entry for its competitors.

Modest tests, continental ambition

The figures remain those of a young company. The team consists of about ten people, mostly engineers, and has not raised any institutional funding: it operates on the founders' own capital and the support of a private investor, according to Techpoint Africa. Trials began in Kenya in 2023, where five television channels paid about $150 per month each for four months, for about 3,000 test users. In Nigeria, the platform broadcast a religious event held in Abuja.

Regarding infrastructure, FreePass operates a rack in an OADC data center in Lagos, connected to the Nigerian Internet Exchange Point (IXPN), and is preparing a second connection in Nairobi. The start-up went through the third cohort of the acceleration program of NigComSat, the Nigerian public satellite operator, and is in discussions with Unicloud as well as tower managers IHS and Helios, reports Techpoint Africa. In Kenya, it is working with the operator JTL.

A challenge of digital sovereignty

Behind the technology lies a political issue: as long as the content viewed in Africa is hosted elsewhere, the bill, performance, and control of the infrastructure remain outside the continent. The media outlet Techcrier summarizes the company's ambition with a simple phrase: keep African internet traffic in Africa.

FreePass remains a small structure compared to global content delivery networks. But its gamble illustrates a fundamental trend: the continent's digital infrastructure is beginning to be built by African engineers, for African uses.