About 90% of Africa’s internet content is hosted outside the continent, says Mark Tinka, head of engineering at pan-African submarine cable network, SEACOM.
According to Tinka, this is despite the huge investment, over the past 6 years, that African telecoms have made in infrastructure to support local content delivery networks (CDNs), such as carrier-neutral data centres, open peering internet exchange points, national and regional fibre links and submarine cables.
While there a lot of advantages to using local CDNs, including better optimised file downloads, media streaming, reduced server, lower latency and generally improved speed of delivery, among other things, there are still a lot of challenges to hosting online content within the continent. Most notable are the issues of reliable, constant power supply and stable and fast internet connections. Nevertheless, Tinka says they would like to see a reversal of figures so that 80% or 90% of content is hosted within African:
“CDNs will make it more viable for African content owners to host their content within the continent. Many content owners currently host their content in Europe or the US because regional links between many African countries are of relatively poor quality. Now they can bring it back to Africa.”, he says.
Source: ITWeb Africa
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