[afnog] Challenges in the African Continent

[Mark Tinka]

On Tuesday 31 March 2009 05:09:28 pm Graham Beneke wrote:

> No - I am referring to smaller scale deployments as well.
> I have come across a number of small/micro ISPs on the
> continent that are running hosting operations that are
> not up to standard:

A number of ISP's will be focused on selling their IP 
services. They are not built for data centre business 
models. So their infrastructure requirements may not be as 
stringent, when compared to so-called "world-class" 
standards.

Having said that, these ISP's might have a lot of redundant 
space that they can lease to a handful of customers that 
want to host kit. The space, power and cooling 
infrastructure may not operate at the scale of what Equinix 
can provide, but it'll serve the purposes for 10 to 15 
customers with a handful of dedicated servers or a couple of 
shared servers.

If the ISP sees this as a potential growth path, they can 
venture into more purpose-built facilities - but like I said 
before, we have to start somewhere.

> * No network redundancy either with local hardware or
> upstream providers. And often - over contended upstreams.

I suppose the key driver for hosting locally would be 
exchange more traffic through the local exchange point, and 
take that off the expensive satellite path.

Customers can still maintain "international" versions of 
their web site and simply redirect visitors based on whether 
they are located at "home" or not.

> This in combination with largely inadequate peering
> infrastructures in many parts of Africa make 'local'
> hosting pretty pointless.

A number of exchange points have been setup in the past 
6yrs, and traffic is growing steadily.

This was even before we imagined hosting content locally 
would be a possibility. We were more concerned about 
transporting e-mail between users in the same country over 
infrastructure in the same country. And the benefits are 
there.

There's still a lot of room for improvement, but it needs to 
be done, and a lot of countries have already joined the 
bandwagon.

> With your traffic 'local' to
> your own customers and everyone else has to access it
> over 2 birds making the latency _double_ that of the
> internationally hosted equivalent.

See my input, above, on local and international mirrors.

Cheers,

Mark.
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