The African Internet is Not Flat

I gave a talk on how the African Internet is not flat at AITEC East Africa ICT summit (http://aitecafrica.com/event/view/95) on November 20. It was a great crowd.

Transcript

1. The African Internet Is Not Flat Adam Nelson http://kili.io
2. Source: submarinecablemap.com
3. Most Paths Lead to the Ocean • Africa is surrounded by navigable water • Most international and all inter-continental traffic goes via undersea cables (or satellite) • And anyway, almost none of the content people want is located here
4. Why Kenyans Use the Internet • Talk on Skype to friends abroad (US, Europe, etc.) • Read the news on The Nation (UK) • Pay somebody via MPesa (Private Network - Germany) • Watch Youtube (Kenya)
5. ISPs • Every Kenyan directly using the Internet uses an Internet Service Provider (Zuku, JTL, Simbanet) • They pay for 5Mbps of bandwidth • The ISP aggregates these users and purchase upstream bandwidth based on an oversubscription factor - maybe about 1.5Mbps/customer • Some transit is more expensive than others
6. My Internet is Slow • Commercial ISPs will (or rather, should) allocate more per-customer upstream bandwidth to their customers because that’s part of why commercial customers pay a premium • Some ISPs heavily over-subscribe their network and their uplinks become saturated - degrading service downstream • Oh yeah … and there’s latency (100ms frequently added to most African traffic because the content is on another continent)
7. Land Internet-Locked Countries • Rwanda transit mostly goes through Kenya and to some degree Tanzania • Countries in Africa far from the ocean are Internet- constrained • Countries in Africa (and around the world) have limited control over data residing or transiting outside their borders
8. Price Discrimination • Connectivity for businesses many times as expensive as for residences • Pre-pay traffic given lower priority than Post-pay traffic on some networks?
9. The Future • ISPs competing to dominate metro areas • ISPs moving up the value chain to delivering exclusive content • Data centers hosting more in-region capacity for performance and data sovereignty reasons • Infrastructure as a Service enabling everything from hosting to complex on-demand architectures like disaster recovery (http://kili.io)
10. Adam Nelson adam@kili.io @varud