Colo in Africa

Tue Jul 16 17:16:48 UTC 2019

On 16/Jul/19 19:00, Ken Gilmour wrote:

>
> Our "market" is actually the US - but we're experiencing unexpected
> success across the world. A lot of our customers have selected
> "Africa" as their region when signing up and they are in various
> countries around Africa, they deserve to be served better within their
> continent at least.

Makes sense.

>
> We can't actually build POPs fast enough, so I want to throw as broad
> a net as possible with our first POP in Africa and then branch out
> from there. We have customers in South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria,
> Egypt, Morocco and Ghana for instance. I have resources for only one
> POP in Africa currently, need to decide where to best serve as many as
> possible. We could serve Northern Africa from EU and Southern Africa
> from Singapore, but having something within the continent would be
> preferable.

If you had to go with one PoP in Africa to start, then I'd suggest
Johannesburg. The data on your side should indicate that this is where
you have the majority of the targets. From here, you can get reasonably
well to all neighboring countries, i.e., Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho,
Botswana, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola. Farther afield,
you will have reasonable latency to East Africa as well, which will get
you Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

Phase 2, I'd say deploy in Nairobi, which will lower your latency for
your targets there, and reduce your load in Johannesburg.

Phase 3, I'd say Accra or Lagos, but that won't be as straight forward.

If you're serious about this, I'd say come down to AfPIF
(https://www.afpif.org/) and SAFNOG (http://www.safnog.org/), both of
which will be happening 20th - 22nd and 26th - 28th, August,
respectively. You will learn a lot by attending both meetings, and since
they are back-to-back, between Mauritius and Johannesburg, it is easy to
do travel-wise.

Otherwise, happy to offline a discussion with you if you want some
mail-time with our Sales droids :-).

Mark.