[Afpif] Global Carriers and CDNs finally in Africa - What does that mean?

[Meoli Kashorda]

Dear colleagues,

August is the month of AFPIF 2017, the one forum that will attract representatives of global carriers and CDNs trying to assess if we in Africa have achieved the "global" Internet traffic volumes necessary to justify their investments. 

2017 is especially exciting for us in Africa who are trying to offer low-cost high speed Internet services to the academic community (I.e., creating the Internet market of the future).

1. Microsoft had a big Africa-wide meeting in Nairobi in February and there is a chance it will establish edge nodes in african countries. Edge nodes would reduce the cost of international Microsoft traffic to zero for an NREN as long as they have access to the edge node (we are still big users of Office 365). 

2. Microsoft recently announced they would be setting up a Microsoft Azure stack in South Africa, a first for Africa. Will that be the end of local start-up cloud providers in Africa? All we need to provide cloud services to our communities is a high speed link to South Africa and that can be provided by companies like SEACOM and Liquid Telecom. 

3. Google already has a PoP  Kenya and that saves East African ISPs the cost of carrying international Google traffic as long as they have a low cost connection to Mombasa, Kenya. Anecdotal evidence suggests that over 50% of Internet traffic in Africa is Google traffic. For example, All universities in Kenya moved their student emails to Google! And many ISPs in Africa already have Global Caches for YouTube in their networks. 

4. Hurricane Electric, the Global carrier has finally landed in Africa and is offering Global IP or L2 prices. What a blessing for African NRENs and independent ISPs? The cost of connecting Nairobi to Johannesburg is now lower than the cost of connecting Nairobi to Mombasa or a University in Nairobi to a KENET PoP in Nairobi! They will disrupt the market in Africa and that is very good for Organizations that depend on the Internet. 

5. It is now possible to get low-cost "paid" peering in Kenya for Akamai, Facebook, Microsoft, CloudFlare etc. This is possible because the CDNs have a presence in Africa but we still have to pay for intra-Africa communication costs. The peering reduces the cost of Internet for ISPs with low cost distribution networks. But prices remain high for those who need to use leased distribution links. 

All of the above are very good developments for African countries and communities in a high state of networked readiness. 

The World Economic Forum publishes the Network Readiness Index in their annual  Global IT reports. Read the reports to see that our networked readiness in Africa is still very low, mobile Internet penetration notwithstanding. And that is why prices are not yet dropping to global average levels. Is it really a chicken and egg question? 

Why is the networked readiness index ranking low for most African countries? We need a forum to start discussing that. 

Kind regards

Meoli Kashorda
KENET , the NREN of Kenya

@meolik