[afnog] Consortium Structure of East African Submarine Cable System Questioned

[Bill Woodcock]

      On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Colin Johnston wrote:
    > I would question why transit costs into a UK or USA peering point would be
    > necessary.

First, so that there isn't greater confusion, this industry uses the words 
"transit" and "transport" to mean two veyr specific, and very different, 
things.  Transport is a ISO layer-1 or layer-2 service, moving bits 
between specific endpoints.  That's what the cable system is intended to 
lower the price of.  Transit is the layer-3 Internet access which is 
layered on top of the transport service by ISPs.  So in short, ISPs are 
_customers_ of transport services, and _vendors_ of transit services.

To answer the question, some transport to IXPs in other regions is 
necessary for any ISPs who wish to communicate directly with IXPs which 
aren't active in their own region.  This is no more or less true for 
Africa than for any other region.  So if a large African ISP wishes to 
communicate with a small British ISP, they'll probably need to purchase 
transport to the LINX in London in order to accomplish that.  In exactly 
the same way, if a large US ISP wants to communicate with a small Kenyan 
ISP, they need to purchase transport to the KIXP in Nairobi in order to 
make that possible.  So in that sense, the problem is a symmetric one, and 
one cable system (which is symmetric, and doesn't care whose bits go which 
direction) solves both problems at once.

Where there's an inequity is in ability to pay.  ISPs in east Africa, even 
operating cohesively and collectively, may not be able to come up with the 
cost of such a cable system, simply because the smaller and less wealthy 
African Internet customer base doesn't generate that much cash yet.

So your point is well taken, that if this project is going to happen, it 
needs to look for disproportionately more funding from the European end of 
the cable than the African end, most likely.  In order to keep that from 
becoming an oligopolistic situation, one would hope that care is taken to 
see that the European corporate investors don't collude to block later 
or smaller entrants access to the fiber, as happened with Sat3.

    > The UK Gov or USA Gov might as well make the transit cost free
    > since it would allow expensive embassy satellite links to be used less.
    > Africa packet usage to UK/USA would be 1% to 2% compared to EU/USA usage.
    
Not to be dismissive, since the core principle you're putting forth here 
is absolutely correct, the language you're couching it in will probably 
dissuade more people than it convinces.  Key points: this is about 
transport not transit, and governments have so little traffic compared to 
the commercial sector that anything they would or could do would be a tiny 
drop in the bucket compared to what needs to happen.  

                                -Bill