Internet exchanges for Africa
The growth of data traffic and Internet and social media users has been the big story over the last two years. But more quietly behind the scenes, Africa has begun to develop a more sophisticated data architecture through a combination of exchange points and data centres. Russell Southwood looks at the progress so far.
One cascade of changes affecting the continent has become very clear. With new, competitive international cables and improved, cheaper fibre access at a national level, wholesale prices in both of these parts of the value chain have dropped.
These wholesale price drops have encouraged retail price drops to end users that have accelerated the growth of Internet use, particularly on mobile phones. Internet subscriber levels that used to be in the hundreds or thousands are now in the tens of thousands to the millions.
There are still blockages at the local loop access level in the value chain and some countries have still not yet got the message on competitive bandwidth costs. On a recent visit to a Central African country, I discovered that an mbps of international bandwidth still costs over US$1,500 compared to the low hundreds or lower in more competitive countries.
But alongside this more public set of changes, a whole set of backroom changes are taking place to accommodate this increased data demand and to create the kind of data architecture found elsewhere in the world. Increased demand – particularly interactive data demand of the kind driven by smartphones and increased video use – need networks that are capable of delivering fast and locally.
There are now two types of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) where local traffic can flow locally rather than having to be routed out and back via New York, Paris or London. There are the shared IXPs created by agreement between carriers and operated at a neutral point and a second category now being offered by neutral data centre provider Teraco out of South Africa.
Of the first category, there are 20 across Africa. Nearly half of these are from countries where there is more than one IXP: South Africa (3), Tanzania (2), Kenya (2) and Nigeria (2). In 2011, there were two new additions in Lesotho and Sudan.
Although some of these have been created in less competitive countries, they have tended to be more successful in more competitive countries. There is a real gap in IXP presence in francophone West Africa where more competitive market regimes have yet to arrive. Take the example of Senegal, where Orange-owned Sonatel controls well over 95% of the data market and the independent ISPs still remaining would all fit comfortably in a small lift. It’s hard to see the rationale for an IXP where there is only one dominant carrier.
A more successful example is Ghana where after a complicated start where there were two competing IXPs, GIXP now brings together 13 carriers, of which Vodafone Ghana is by far the largest. However, its presence has not overwhelmed and put out of business the other 13 data carriers that exist in the country. Furthermore, there is a local Google cache server that improves response time.
GIXP is reaching a peak traffic of 961.21 mbps, most of which is You Tube traffic. Traffic through other IXPs varies from 128 kbps (Swaziland) through to 911 mbps (Kenya). South Africa has two big IXP and one much smaller ones: Johannesburg with 3.3 gbps, Cape Town with 1.5 gbps and Grahamstown with 4.3 mbps. These figures date back to mid-year 2012 and undoubtedly have increased since that point.
The second category of IXP being offered is from Teraco and is called NAPAfrica. Launched 5 months ago, it now has 1 gbps of traffic. It is focused not only on local Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but on large content providers, carriers and enterprise, both local and international to service the whole of Africa.
NAPAfrica started as an initial exchange of just 64 mbps and the recent growth makes it one of the largest multi-lateral peering exchanges in Africa. NAPAfrica argues that it offers customers an immediately visible and continuously growing network of peers with just one peering agreement. “The simplicity of just one agreement is further enhanced by settlement-free interconnection,” says Lex Van Wyk, Managing Director, Teraco.
The pitch is that instead of having to establish, manage and maintain individual peering sessions with each exchange participant, peers at NAPAfrica have the option of creating only one peering session with the route servers. “Currently we manage 1045 interconnects and offer access to over 20 carriers offering our clients access to a total capacity of 23tbps.” says van Wyk. “We’ve also seen over 4gbps of private peering live within the data centre which truly demonstrates the core benefit of an exchange like NAPAfrica.” NAPAfrica works Africa Cloud eXchange (ACX), which Teraco launched earlier in the year.
These kinds of shared data delivery network that will help reduce the operating costs to both consumers and corporates, rely on the existence of data centres. The number and size of these have been growing rapidly over the last 12 months but outside of South Africa most are still well below the 1,000 sq m level. However, some of these will fit into global networks of data centres. Orange will open a data centre in Johannesburg that will form part of its global data centre delivery network.
As with every kind of infrastructure, these have become new “pinch points” where the dominant mobile players try to assert their control over this emerging market. For example, a mobile operator will build a data centre and tell potential customers that they can only use it if they buy connectivity from them. The larger, more dominant players have more peering relationships and therefore can use this to capture market share. Neutral data centre providers can offer a much more cost effective service and if they achieve “critical mass” will succeed in gaining significant market share and peering connections.
However, the mind-set change required to see data centres as essential part of operating a data network is slow in coming. One small neutral data centre operator told us in some frustration:”If their office building hasn’t burnt down yet, they can’t see the point.”
But the global relationships that will improve data centre delivery are beginning to fall into place. Nigerian international cable Main One has a Tier 3 power rated rack space that is connected to a backbone, via diverse physical and logical network paths. This week it became part of the International Data Centre Group (IDC-G), the first global data centre alliance with 33 carrier neutral data centres across 5 continents. Beyond the existing facilities, the company is actively planning the construction of additional data centres in Lagos.
Related articles
Telecoms accounts for most VC activity in SA
Link Africa secures municipal fibre patent
DFA enters Mthatha with R10m kitty
Loading ...