On 16/Jul/19 19:00, Ken Gilmour wrote:
Our "market" is actually the US - but we're experiencing unexpected success across the world. A lot of our customers have selected "Africa" as their region when signing up and they are in various countries around Africa, they deserve to be served better within their continent at least.
Makes sense.
We can't actually build POPs fast enough, so I want to throw as broad a net as possible with our first POP in Africa and then branch out from there. We have customers in South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco and Ghana for instance. I have resources for only one POP in Africa currently, need to decide where to best serve as many as possible. We could serve Northern Africa from EU and Southern Africa from Singapore, but having something within the continent would be preferable.
If you had to go with one PoP in Africa to start, then I'd suggest Johannesburg. The data on your side should indicate that this is where you have the majority of the targets. From here, you can get reasonably well to all neighboring countries, i.e., Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola. Farther afield, you will have reasonable latency to East Africa as well, which will get you Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. Phase 2, I'd say deploy in Nairobi, which will lower your latency for your targets there, and reduce your load in Johannesburg. Phase 3, I'd say Accra or Lagos, but that won't be as straight forward. If you're serious about this, I'd say come down to AfPIF (https://www.afpif.org/) and SAFNOG (http://www.safnog.org/), both of which will be happening 20th - 22nd and 26th - 28th, August, respectively. You will learn a lot by attending both meetings, and since they are back-to-back, between Mauritius and Johannesburg, it is easy to do travel-wise. Otherwise, happy to offline a discussion with you if you want some mail-time with our Sales droids :-). Mark.