[Afpif] Transit vs. peering Focust for Africa by 2021

[Meoli Kashorda]

Dear all,

I have enjoyed the discussion on local content and Africa Internet. AfPIF 2015 will be interesting. But want to make some observations / comments.

1. First the original post by Michuki suggested that data was showing that we had already achieved 60% content served from Africa! So we had only 20% to achieve 80% by 2020. It is not  20% local and 80% global but 60% local and 40% global! This is progress. 

2. Sustainability or profitability of African operators building fiber and 3G /4G national networks is significantly enhanced by presence of Global content distributors (Google and Akamai in Kenya) having a presence in our countries (not continent because cross-border leased lines are still very high, at least in EA).

3. Both Google and Akamai do not seem to care too much about carrier neutral data centers. Just data centers, even Tier 2 data centers. Our challenge is the high cost of broadband leased lines used to distribute broadband content not collocation or even the problems lack of carrier-neutral data centers. 

4. I think local content distribution will be subsidized by the global content in Africa. In any case, what is local content? The local TV stations all have YouTube channel and even universities have a YouTube channel and that is what is what is driving Google traffic. Google Mail is carrying local email. Facebook has a lot of what is really local content that users want to access. How will you measure local content on a global CDN? 

I will be at AFPIF 2015 and looking forward to learn what is working local content development and what is driving the national broadband infrastructures. 

In our e-readiness survey research for higher education  (http://ereadiness.kenet.or.ke), we prefer the use of the term "locally relevant content". 

Thanks

Meoli




> On Aug 9, 2015, at 12:31 PM, Nishal Goburdhan <nishal at controlfreak.co.za> wrote:
> 
> On 6 Aug 2015, at 18:04, Meoli Kashorda wrote:
> 
> 
>> Let us just grow the Internet in Africa without worrying too much about whose content it is
> 
> yes and no.
> 
> of course you should focus on growing internet access.
> but not worrying about the content source -is not helping the problem.
> 
> you _want_ to be in a position where you have locally significant content (or userbase) to the point that other operators are willing to build to your region to access this.  see what mark said about europe and north america earlier.
> 
> if you continue to assume that it’s ok to consume mostly external content, then you aren’t playing for the long game…
> 
> —n