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Q: DrPeering -
Fiber is being deployed across some countries in Africa very rapidly. Is Africa an emerging market for peering? What are the obstacles and how long with it take for Africa to catch up to the West?
A:
The African continent is a new frontier for Internet Peering. Here is why.
Emerging Peering Forum. Karen Rose (ISOC) and her team (Michuki Mwangi, Chris Morris, and many others) organized their second terrific peering forum last week called the African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF-2) in Accra, Ghana. As many of you know, it takes a few peering forums before they become a must-attend event, and these are well on their way to becoming a continental peering forum. And this continent has huge potential.
Massive underdeveloped Internet Region. Consider the graphic below (thanks Karen Rose and informationisbeutiful.net) showing that the continent of Africa is absolutely massive. It is also underdeveloped from an Internet penetration perspective. Of the 1 billion people on this continent, less than 20% have Internet access. Hence the word potential.
Inexpensive Peering Infrastructure. Many of us are used to hearing about the bleeding edge of technology, but there are some good aspects to being on the trailing edge. Many countries are having some early success in peering reusing free hand-me-down or inexpensive second hand switches. The deployed technology is sound - their peering switches are very well tested in battle hardened environments. All of this leads to lower peering costs and speedier arrival critical mass.
Risk-Seeking Technology Agnostic Population. Kenya has leap frogged the west. With ePesa, people buy and sell goods on the street using their cell phone. A merchant selling a bag of potatoes can set the price for the passerby who sends the money using his cell phone. Her phone alerts her of the money transfer and she hands over the potatoes. The same cell phone is then used for paying her bills. Pretty cool, and driven by the poor state of the physical banking infrastructure in the country (long lines, short hours, charing for deposits and withdrawals, etc.). Cell phone commerce is relatively frictionless.
So the population is not technophobic and used to leveraging mobile technology.
Internet Transit is Expensive. The price of Internet Transit across Africa is so high (~$350/Mbps) that the business case for peering is pretty easy to make. However, the amount of locally in-country peerable traffic is pretty low. Most of the content that the eyeballs want is originated in the U.S. or Europe. As a result, the amount of traffic peered across an African IX is in the Mbps or down in South Africa in the Gbps. It will be some time before they wrestle with the switching trunk issues of the European IXes that peer in the Tbps.
Needs Local Content. The emerging peering community is using any means necessary to bring down content providers to locally host their content in Africa. In many cases, this can be accomplished by luring the CDNs down, as they deliver so much of the content desired by this population. This is taking longer than it should, as the content providers generally will do anything they can to make sure that all eyeballs have a positive experience. They in turn can apply pressure on their CDNs to build into and throughout Africa.
Needs Knowledge Workers. One thing that is missing is education and peering evangelism to bring these communities together. Early switch deployments across Africa countries was not sufficient to build a peering population. There needs to be leadership to pull the various ISPs and content providers together into a peering point, and then evangelize that peering point to others. That is why these peering forums are so valuable and why I contributed my time and some content to the forum including the Peering Simulation Game and various stories and excerpts from The Internet Peering Playbook.
Friendly Group of Folks. I will admit that I rather enjoyed the book signing line (shown below). I had never written a book so had never done one before and it was very gratifying to get the content into the hands of people who really wanted the material. I found the populations in the peering communities to be social, friendly, and passionate about peering. These are of course necessary for emerging peering populations to advance the continental peering initiatives.
Government interest and support for peering. I know, governmental involvement or interest is a negative to many of you. And to me as well, but there are many millions earmarked for encouraging more peering across the continent. The people I met were as passionate about learning about peering, and seem to want to encourage the right things. Money may provide the lubrication needed to motivate peering among some of the larger providers across the continent as done during the NSFNET transition period in the U.S.
One African Peering Challenge: Digging up Fiber
At this conference we spoke a lot about peering being one of the answers to the problem of poor Internet access across the continent. Others issues Africa face are the lack of cheap high capacity fiber and power infrastructure.
Quite a bit of fiber has been laid across some of the countries in Africa.
Some of the fiber is the victim of sabotage from competitors. But that is a small percentage of the total fiber ripped out of the ground.
Some of this fiber is ripped out of the ground in Kenya by the poor that are used to digging up the copper wire from the ground and making jewelry to sell by the side of the road. There are many stories of pick axes turned into molten metal after hitting the live power lines. The fiber companies then put up signs indicating that this is a fiber run, not a copper run, and they will get no value from digging up the fiber. But many of these people can not read, so the signs do no good.
In some areas the fiber companies lay the fiber with a Kevlar sheath to protect the fiber. These bundles are cut and attached to the tow bar of trucks and yanked out of the ground for the Kevlar, which the poor weave into black market bullet proof vests.
In response, the fiber providers pour cement over the trenched fiber in high loss areas. A very time-intensive and expensive process.
In some parts of Africa, there are sections where the “Area Boys” harass the fiber layers until they get paid off. It was portrayed as a kind of young man’s mafia.
The other issues raised at the conference are common across other parts of the world.
Top 10 Challenges for the African Internet (as heard at the AfPIF-2 conference)
1)Dominance by incumbents - lots of anti-competitive behaviors
2)limited IXPs - many assumed the field of dreams approach
3)absence of tariff/price controls to essential facilities - too expensive
4)lack of market awareness - need education
5)low investment in transport & energy infrastructure - stable power and facilities
6)difficulty in acquiring rights of way - challenges outlined above
7)low economies of scale - volume makes peering make sense
8)country conflicts - wars, legacy bad blood delay deployments
9)challenges with cross border circuits - a perennial favorite here
10) limited local content - most content comes from Europe and U.S.
Top 10 Opportunities
(as heard at the AfPIF conference)
1)Nolliwood - believe it or not, Nigeria actually produces a ton of really good video content. The Soap Operas in particular are quite addicting.
2)SECOM has available massive fiber between countries via the ocean.
3)GDP growth - leads the world here.
4)1 Billion people (2B eyeballs).
5)More middle income people than India.
6)Cellphone Internet
7)It has 4 times larger population than developed economies
8)Growth potential - 21% penetration vs. 75% in the west.
9)MWEB and others uncapping and starting disruptive and enabling pricing.
10)RTT can go from 800ms down to 200 ms migrating from satellite to terrestrial and transoceanic.
To me, the best argument for peering is that there are over a billion people in Africa - lots of eyeballs that are experiencing sub-standard Internet access. In South Africa companies like MWEB are pushing uncapped Internet access and people are using it. There appears to be a latent market demand here. An emerging rich African infrastructure will enable high-speed access to a new large population using primarily mobile Internet technologies. This will no doubt take some years, but can you think of a more exciting new frontier?
[Thanks to Karen Rose for the invitation to speak and release my book at the AfPIF-2 meeting, and thanks to Scott Landman for edits to this article. ]
Fiber gets buried in Africa and then what happens?
Digging Peering in Africa
August 16, 2011
The 2014 Internet Peering Playbook
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