Without being more specific on what geographic region you want to serve, in terms of ISPs, it's hard to say.

For example:

If you look at submarine cable topology at layer 1, and BGP sessions, AS adjacencies between ISPs: Freetown, Sierra Leone and Monrovia, Liberia are suburbs of London, UK.

If you want to reach major things in the west african region the two best connected places are Accra, Ghana and Lagos, Nigeria.

On the other hand, if you put equipment topologically close to the cable landing station in Accra it will have rather poor connectivity to the east side of Africa. It's a big place and there is very little cross-continent connectivity that doesn't take the long way around via submarine fiber to Cape Town, and then up the east coast.


On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 7:34 AM Ken Gilmour <ken.gilmour@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Folks,

I work for a Security Analytics org and we're looking to build a small POP in Africa. I am pretty clueless about the region so I was wondering if you could help guide me in the right direction for research?

The challenges:
  1. Network needs to be able to receive millions of small PPS (as opposed to serving smaller numbers of larger files).
  2. Can't be cloud (need bare metal servers / colo). We use the full capacity of each server, all the time.
  3. Must have good connectivity to most of the rest of Africa
  4. We can initially only have one POP
This is not like a normal website that we can just host on "any old provider", the requirements are very different.

Is there a good location where we could either rent bare metal servers (something like Internap - preferred) or colocate servers within Africa that can serve most of the region?

"Good" is defined as an area with stable connectivity and power, no legal restrictions on things like encryption, and good latency (sub 100ms) to the rest of Africa.

Our two closest POPs are in Singapore and The Netherlands, so I'd like something closer to the middle that can serve the rest of Africa. Middle East will be deployed after Africa.

I hope this is the right place to ask.

Thanks!

Ken