Proving Gig Speed

Thu Jul 19 15:29:15 UTC 2018

Mark already knows this, but for the benefit of the North American network
operators on the list, **where** in Africa makes a huge difference. Certain
submarine cables reach certain coastal cities at very different transport
prices, depending on location, what sort of organizational structure of
cable it is, age of cable, etc.

For example Sierra Leone and Liberia are logically network stubs, suburbs
of London, UK. To the best of my knowledge the ISPs and mobile network
operators there greatly prefer buying transport capacity to reach London
rather than the other direction to Accra and Lagos. I do not know of any SL
or LR ISPs which have small POPs with IP edge routers in Accra or Lagos,
and definitely not in Cape Town. Whatever circuits exist for voice traffic
that go to Lagos are much smaller.

On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 7:27 AM, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:

>
>
> On 18/Jul/18 16:22, K. Scott Helms wrote:
>
> > Mark,
> >
> > I am glad I don't have your challenges :)
> >
> > What's the Netflix (or other substantial OTT video provider) situation
> > for direct peers?  It's pretty easy and cheap for North American
> > operators to get settlement free peering to Netflix, Amazon, Youtube
> > and others but I don't know what that looks like in Africa.
>
> Peering isn't the problem. Proximity to content is.
>
> Netflix, Google, Akamai and a few others have presence in Africa
> already. So those aren't the problem (although for those currently in
> Africa, not all of the services they offer globally are available here -
> just a few).
>
> A lot of user traffic is not video streaming, so that's where a lot of
> work is required. In particular, cloud and gaming operators are the ones
> causing real pain.
>
> All the peering in the world doesn't help if the latency is well over
> 100ms+. That's what we need to fix.
>
> Mark.
>