Peering isn't the problem. Proximity to content is.
Netflix, Google, Akamai and a few others have presence in Africa already. So those aren't the problem (although for those currently in Africa, not all of the services they offer globally are available here - just a few).
A lot of user traffic is not video streaming, so that's where a lot of work is required. In particular, cloud and gaming operators are the ones causing real pain.
All the peering in the world doesn't help if the latency is well over 100ms+. That's what we need to fix.
Mark.
Mark, I agree completely, I'm working on a paper right now for a conference (waiting on Wireshark to finish with my complex filter at the moment) that shows what's happening with gaming traffic. What's really interesting is how gaming is changing and within the next few years I do expect a lot of games to move into the remote rendering world. I've tested several and the numbers are pretty substantial. You need to have <=30 ms of latency to sustain 1080p gaming and obviously jitter and packet loss are also problematic. The traffic is also pretty impressive with spikes of over 50 mbps down and sustained averages over 21 mbps. Upstream traffic isn't any more of an issue than "normal" online gaming. Nvidia, Google, and a host of start ups are all in the mix with a lot of people predicting Sony and Microsoft will be (or are already) working on pure cloud consoles. Scott Helms