Colo in Africa

[Joel.Snyder at opus1.com (Joel M Snyder)]

Ken:

 >Is there a good location where we could either rent bare metal servers
 >(something like Internap - preferred) or colocate servers within
 >Africa that can serve most of the region?

Africa is a tough nut to crack.  I have been building networks there for 
clients for decades and the first thing to understand is that Africa is 
BIG.  Geographically, you can fit the US, Europe, and Canada (and have 
room to spare).  Typical Mercator maps make it look much smaller than it 
really is.  Anyway, my point here is that you should not be thinking 
about Africa as "a region" or "a continent."

When a lot of people say "Africa," they really mean "South Africa" (the 
small country), and there is great connectivity there---but positioning 
yourself in South Africa doesn't really help you any more to get to 
Ghana (for example) than being in the Netherlands.

If you really are thinking AFRICA as in AFRICA, you probably should use 
an approach that divides it into regions.  You can break it up however 
you want, but if you start with 4 regions (Southern, Northern, Western, 
Eastern/Central) you'll have chunks that actually hold together from a 
telecoms point of view pretty well.

My best experiences (and these are about 3 years out of date) have been 
in Jo'burg (Southern), Nairobi/Addis (Eastern/Central), Ghana (Western), 
and Egypt (Northern), but there is a lot of interest and a lot of 
progress so getting some ground knowledge would be a good idea.

The real bandwidth is submarine cables that go up and down the coasts 
--- you can find some maps of these of varying accuracy and quality --- 
while actual E/W and N/S connectivity in the center of the continent is 
much more limited.

There are a number of Internet-promoting organizations in Africa---you 
can start with ISOC and Afrinic that sponsor a number of projects aimed 
at increasing capacity there, but you'll find a bunch of people trying 
to do good things.  If you are mostly interested in South Africa, 
there's NAPAfrica and SAFNOG (Southern African equivalent of NANOG) as 
information sources.

Anyway: I can get more specific, but it's hard to really offer 
super-specific advice on a vague question because, you know, Africa. 
That's a big topic.

jms


-- 
Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719
Senior Partner, Opus One       Phone: +1 520 324 0494
jms at Opus1.COM                http://www.opus1.com/jms