[afnog] Challenges in the African Continent

[Graham Beneke]

Mark Tinka wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 

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:

* Using underpowered hardware that is unable to serve requests timeously.

* No useful power backup. A consumer grade 600VA UPS that lasts 20
minutes does not count as power backup.

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

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

-- 
Graham Beneke
Apolix Internet Services
E-Mail/MSN/Jabber: graham at apolix.co.za   Skype: grbeneke
VoIP: 087-750-5696                       Cell: 082-432-1873
http://www.apolix.co.za/