Colo in Africa

Wed Jul 17 06:04:42 UTC 2019

On 17/Jul/19 03:05, Eric Kuhnke wrote:

> Without being more specific on what geographic region you want to
> serve, in terms of ISPs, it's hard to say.
>
> For example:
>
> If you look at submarine cable topology at layer 1, and BGP sessions,
> AS adjacencies between ISPs: Freetown, Sierra Leone and Monrovia,
> Liberia are suburbs of London, UK.
>
> If you want to reach major things in the west african region the two
> best connected places are Accra, Ghana and Lagos, Nigeria.
>
> On the other hand, if you put equipment topologically close to the
> cable landing station in Accra it will have rather poor connectivity
> to the east side of Africa. It's a big place and there is very little
> cross-continent connectivity that doesn't take the long way around via
> submarine fiber to Cape Town, and then up the east coast.

The shortest path to get to East Africa from West Africa is as south as
you can go into Europe.

I suppose if you are trying to interconnect both regions for corporate
reasons, that should be okay. But if you're trying to offload content,
it's easier to do cache-fill from Europe and distribute locally.

It's easier to get your systems talking to one another between Eastern
and Southern Africa (and either one to/from Europe) as the connectivity
on that side is a lot more robust.

Mark.