[afnog] Challenges in the African Continent

[Mark Tinka]

On Sunday 29 March 2009 02:39:15 pm Graham Beneke wrote:

> It is not fair to try to compare Africa with places like
> Hong Kong. The sheer population density in Hong Kong
> makes the business case for broadband completely
> different. Hong Kong has high bandwidth because it makes
> financial sense. If you want that same kind of bandwidth
> - go live in Hong Kong ;-)

Besides, it's a fairly small country - much easier to wrap 
fibre around than as opposed to, say, a much larger country 
in Africa.

Same reason Singapore is blanketed in Wi-Fi. They can afford 
to do it!

Hence, as you mention, we should look at Africa on its own 
merits, but still drawing on examples from (more) developed 
nations.

> I think that this is a skills issue. The cost of
> obtaining skilled engineers that can build datacenters of
> the grades that are seen in the US and EU is extremely
> high. The fact that many of these skills would need to be
> imported does not help the costs.

I think this is jumping the gun a little. You are referring 
to a fairly mid-to-large scale deployment.

A lot of ISP's in Africa have a bit of space in their 
buildings that host mostly a handful of routers, switches 
and a few customer-supporting production servers (mail, DNS, 
that sort of thing). Much of the remaining space could be 
used to host a couple of web servers (for instance), each in 
turn hosting a number of web sites (virtual hosts), e.t.c.

Of course, as this grows, it would be necessary to consider 
a more purpose-built, neutral facility. However, we need to 
start somewhere - allow growth to be natural and understood.

Cheers,

Mark.
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