AfPIF 2017: MainOne canvasses local Internet traffic exchange within Africa

West Africa’s leading provider of connectivity and data center solutions, MainOne has reiterated the importance of Internet traffic domiciliation as a key requirement for growing the internet ecosystem in Africa. Speaking at the just concluded African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF), MainOne’s Chief Executive Officer, Funke Opeke challenged the continent’s leading Internet players to exchange traffic on the continent, noting that this would significantly lower costs and improve performance.

During her keynote address titled “Vision 80/20 by 2020” which approached the goal set by AfPIF to route 80% of Africa’s Internet traffic on the continent by the year 2020, Ms. Opeke examined the internet landscape in Africa and rued the current ecosystem of routing over 80% of the Internet traffic from Nigeria abroad, incurring expensive transit costs and increasing service latency.



According to her, transactions initiated in Africa typically leave the sender for a long journey outside the continent, usually to Europe, America or even Asia before returning to target recipient e.g. a bank down the road from the sender, with the response traveling all the way back the same tortuous route to the sender. She inquired why an end-user who requests to access his records in a bank down the road would want their banking transaction to travel from Lagos to London, when it is feasible to interconnect this traffic, and revealed that this process of routing traffic outside the continent increases Internet costs and delays content delivery to the region by approximately 150 milliseconds.

Ms. Opeke noted that “Africa needs to retain more local traffic within the continent to drive more value from the Internet. This can be achieved by leveraging robust Internet Exchange Points and access via local interconnection points and local data centers which provide a platform for different networks to directly interconnect with other operators and exchange traffic, guaranteeing lower bandwidth costs, quicker access to more content providers and carriers and lower latency for local markets.”

She explained that until a few years ago, internet capacity in Africa was low with few high-speed networks and data centers to provide users the connectivity and content they desired. According to her, this narrative is changing, as Africa’s growing fiber network density and increase in world-class data centers makes it much easier for content providers and OTT operators to host and serve data locally. Ms. Opeke said MainOne’s data center company, MDXi had addressed these concerns by hosting the Nigerian Internet Exchange and launching an open interconnection service to facilitate collaboration and peering within its Lekki data center. Ms. Opeke also shared the company’s strategy towards deepening regional integration and digital transformation of West Africa with submarine access to data centers in Lagos and Accra interconnecting all major operators, a new data center coming up in Sagamu, Nigeria, and its intent to extend its submarine cable to Cote D’Ivoire.

During the panel session that followed, industry experts queried why Nigeria, with the largest number of investments in subsea cables in the region, has failed to produce digital oil by taking its rightful place as the Internet hub for West Africa. They urged for regulatory incentives to increase private and public peering at local exchanges to boost internet traffic, which is guaranteed to create and improve the ease of doing business across the continent and boost economic growth.

An initiative of the Internet Society, the three-day conference focused on developing Internet interconnection and traffic exchange opportunities and brought together key infrastructure providers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), global content producers and providers, data center operators, policy-makers and regulators and other key players across Africa to discuss Internet traffic exchange issues on the continent.