Hi Mark,

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.

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.

Thanks!

Ken

On Tue, 16 Jul 2019 at 10:52, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.mu> wrote:


On 16/Jul/19 16:33, Ken Gilmour wrote:

Hi Folks,

I work for a Security Analytics org and we're looking to build a small POP in Africa.

Where, in Africa? It's not a small place...


  1. Network needs to be able to receive millions of small PPS (as opposed to serving smaller numbers of larger files).

Depending on where in Africa you want to deploy, there will be a choice of service providers.


  1. Can't be cloud (need bare metal servers / colo). We use the full capacity of each server, all the time.

This is possible, but will depend on where, in Africa, you want to deploy.


  1. Must have good connectivity to most of the rest of Africa

This is a tricky one, but if you know where you want to be, it will help to give you options.


  1. We can initially only have one POP

Not a problem, but where?


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?

Africa is huge, with varying levels of quality of connectivity. The 3 main regions are East Africa (Kenya leading), Southern Africa (South Africa leading) and West Africa (Nigeria and Ghana leading).

For North Africa, your options can swing between Egypt and Morocco.

But stringing all of these locations together, particularly West and North to East and South, will not be straight forward.




"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.

Yes, all 5 will be difficult at this point in time.

For most of that, hosting within Eastern and Southern Africa will be your best bets.

West Africa ticks a lot of the boxes, but it's not very straight forward when it comes to co-lo.




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.

Singapore is closer to Eastern & Southern Africa. Will be too far to West Africa unless you want to switch in Europe.

The Netherlands is okay for all of Africa.

The Middle East is closer to Eastern Africa. Too far for West Africa unless you want to switch in Europe.

Mark.