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Building Africa's Information Highway: African ISP Association Selects Regional Carriers

(IDRC Photo: Y. Beaulieu)

2005-07

This spring, AfrISPA, the Association of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Africa, announced the two successful bids in response to its call for proposals to provide direct Internet connections between African countries. (Establishing these connection is called "regional peering"; the companies providing the connections are called "regional carriers").

One of the winning bids came from Transtel, one of the largest private telecommunication network operators in the southern hemisphere and a division of Transnet Limited. The other was a joint bid from Africa Online, a pan-African ISP, and Sky Vision, a leading provider of international Internet services over satellite and terrestrial fibre optic systems.

True inter-country connectivity

The regional peering is intended to advance AfrISPA’s goals: "to establish true inter-country connectivity within the African continent, to remove the current dependence on overseas carriers and to promote the establishment and growth of regional data carriers."

AfrISPA says that the new regional connectivity will also result in "reduced costs, improved speeds and the improvement of the Internet backbone within Africa as a whole."

Information travelling over the Internet from one African country to another currently follows an incredibly indirect route. The only on-ramps to the Internet for African ISPs have been almost entirely through network operators from G8 countries, and there are no direct links connecting ISPs from different African countries. This means that an email going from one African country to another will not take the most logical route — directly from country to country — but must travel off the continent. Using these international routes for local traffic is unnecessarily expensive and slow, especially because the system is such that African ISPs pay 100% of the cost of the international connections.

In about a dozen African countries, ISPs have linked together at what’s called Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) so that traffic destined for points within the country stays within the country. These local connections cost a fraction of what the international ones do, and each ISP pays just half of the cost of connecting with the other ISPs.

The AfrISPA project will take this one step further, connecting these national IXPs in regional IXPs so that the only Internet traffic that needs to leave the continent is traffic that is truly international.

The infrastructure for growth

"Most people recognize that access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) and to information and participation in the global information economy is an integral part of positive growth," says Steve Song, Managing Director of Connectivity Africa, a Canadian program to improve access to ICTs in Africa. "The lack of regional IXPs in Africa means that access is just that much more expensive."

The benefits of improved connectivity on the continent are many, including the potential for increased trade within Africa. "One of the inhibitors to trade is the lack of effective communications among African countries," says Song. "This peering will have the effect of improving intra-African communications, which, in theory, could lead to increased trade among African countries. … trade tends to follow infrastructure, whether it’s roads, telecoms or the Internet."

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