On Thursday, October 30, 2014 12:41:55 AM Jim Popovitch wrote:
As for Africa... I use the RamNode Netherlands to provide coverage to Africa. I spent the past year and half trolling the African VPS marketplace, and while there are excellent providers, the peering SUCKS. I'm not going to get into why the peering sucks... let's just say that one or two strategic providers seem to like for everything to route through London. Anyhoo... In South Africa you can get solid VPS'es from domains.co.za, and vps.co.za. Their network peerings will also allow you to adequately cover 75% of Nambia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique. On the Eastern side of the continent there is kilihost.com (formerly aptus.co.tz), however they are still working with TIX and KIXP (and have been for years) to establish better regional peering (the whole of East Africa seems to route 95% of traffic through London... someone on this list provides that transit.... hopefully at cost....).
For eastern and southern Africa, there are reasonable peering locations that could help fix these problems. But the issue is not that a handful of providers prefer to route everything through London, but that the majority of service providers and mobile networks in Africa prefer to buy capacity into Europe, than from local service providers selling IP in Africa. The reasons for this are legacy. While those reasons are falling away and we are seeing more and more uptake for service in-continent, it's not coming fast enough. Mark.