On Tue, 7 Feb 2006, Joe Abley wrote: > I would not be surprised if the toplogical centre of today's African > Internet turned out to be the LINX. Yep, with 111 8th close behind. On Tue, 7 Feb 2006, Frank Bulk wrote: > A look at Telegeography's bandwidth maps suggest that the African > routes are predominantly coastal. Effectively, there's no connection between North Africa and the rest of Africa... North Africa is relatively well connected to Europe via multiple cables across the Mediterranean. The western coast of Africa, wrapping around down to Cape Town, is "served" by SAT3/WASC, which is a consortium cable with a strict noncompete, so there's no market pricing available anywhere along there... Fiber is just as expensive as satellite, but with the additional cost and hassle of monopoly backhaul from the landing. East Africa and the land-locked central African countries are unserved. Since Nigeria is a huge market and generates a fair amount of cash relative to other markets in Africa, there are a couple of new cables which may soon introduce competition on the relatively short route from Lisbon down to Lagos and Abuja. Also, there's been talk forever, but no action, on an East African cable which would close the loop down from Djibouti to Cape Town, serving Mombasa and Dar and Maputo. The population on the east coast is smaller and less densely packed, though, and the fact that SAT3/WASC is effectively running without a safety net (unless anybody's bothering to patch a protect loop through SAFE to KL and back again through FLAG, which I doubt) doesn't seem to bother anybody, since the cable is priced out of the market anyway, and is thus virtually empty. Anyway, back to the conversation at hand: On Tue, 7 Feb 2006, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote: > Middle Eastern Exchange Points > I know of a Cairo IXP, and possibly one in the UAE. Is there one in > Kuwait as yet? All the ISPs I've talked to in Egypt claim that the Cairo IX was a failed experiment and that they haven't heard anything about it in the last two years. Which roughly corresponds with the last time I heard anyone talking about it in the present tense. But I'll defer to Joe if he has other information. As Joe's pointed out, what's available in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait are governmental monopoly incumbent transit services, a la STIX, as opposed to Internet exchanges where peering takes place. There are several private colocation facilities which sell transit, but are not IXes, in Dubai and Kuwait. There has been a Bahrain governmental effort to get an actual neutral IX going, which has been taking a while to get up to speed, and isn't out of the weeds yet... They've been talking to all the right people, have a site, have commitments from all of the cable systems, have ISP customers who've signed letters of intent and have cash waiting, but they don't have a building yet, just a bunch of cargo containers sitting on the lot in Manama, and a satellite dish farm. Nothing else I know of. -Bill