Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.

Mon Sep 15 09:22:27 UTC 2008

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 7:13 AM, Jim Mercer <jim at reptiles.org> wrote:

> oddly enough, the ISP's in the region have not caught on to the potential
> winfall of providing cost effective hosting locally, so therefore, the bulk
> of the hosting for companies in the region is primarily done in the US,
> then
> in EU, then, maybe locally.
>
> if you drive down Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, and check where the hosting
> is
> for 90% of the URL's on the billboards (even those with .ae domains), you
> will
> find that they follow the above pattern.
>
> a primary example is that of du.ae, one of the only two
> incumbent/dual-opoly
> providers for the UAE, hosts its own website and customer portal in Canada,
> even though it has a perfectly fine data center (if not more than one) in
> Dubai.

The political implications are interesting; the UAE has been more than keen
to attract fibreoptic infrastructure, but setting up an IX would encourage
local networks to interconnect without going via either Etisalat or Du,
which has consequences both for their quasi-official monopoly and for the
government's mass Internet filtering policy.

There are (as you know Bob) already office developments that are allowed to
have their own access to $World, and presumably there are networks in them;
if they were allowed to interconnect with each other and with other
networks, who knows? anarchy, cats and dogs making love in the streets, etc.

Interestingly, other emerging markets did it the opposite way round. Kenya,
frex, established an IX long before it had even the hope of submarine cable
access. Now, with the new East African projects, there is talk of an
Indian-style call centre/backoffice boom.