Mark already knows this, but for the benefit of the North American network operators on the list, **where** in Africa makes a huge difference. Certain submarine cables reach certain coastal cities at very different transport prices, depending on location, what sort of organizational structure of cable it is, age of cable, etc. For example Sierra Leone and Liberia are logically network stubs, suburbs of London, UK. To the best of my knowledge the ISPs and mobile network operators there greatly prefer buying transport capacity to reach London rather than the other direction to Accra and Lagos. I do not know of any SL or LR ISPs which have small POPs with IP edge routers in Accra or Lagos, and definitely not in Cape Town. Whatever circuits exist for voice traffic that go to Lagos are much smaller. On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 7:27 AM, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.mu> wrote:
On 18/Jul/18 16:22, K. Scott Helms wrote:
Mark,
I am glad I don't have your challenges :)
What's the Netflix (or other substantial OTT video provider) situation for direct peers? It's pretty easy and cheap for North American operators to get settlement free peering to Netflix, Amazon, Youtube and others but I don't know what that looks like in Africa.
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.