Re: Tanzanian ISPs move closer to establishing an Internet exchange

[Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>]

On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 02:21:06PM -0700, Bill Woodcock wrote:
>       On Tue, 13 May 2003, Brian Candler wrote:
>     > Building an IX would be an attractive commercial proposition.
> 
> I don't understand your argument...  You're saying that if Africa were
> like the rest of the world, IXes would be a profit-making enterprise,
> although they aren't in the rest of the world?

No - I was just trying to say that the assertion "African ISPs are spending
$400m per year on intra-country traffic" just feels way too high, because if
there really were that much money to be saved, then somebody would be in for
a slice of it.

On the generous assumption that within-country traffic counts for 20% of
volume, that means that $2bn per year is being spent by African ISPs on
satellite space (the transit is almost free in comparison). If that's true,
they could easily launch their own satellite between them; that would only
cost a few hundred million.

In the UK, people join the London Internet Exchange certainly to save on
transit costs, but also because our customers expect traffic to another
provider in the UK to take 5ms, not 200ms, to get there; and fewer hops
usually also means less packet loss. It's as much about quality of service
as anything. In fact the bigger players all have private peering links
anyway, so the IXP is really just a mopping-up ground for conveniently
linking to the smaller players.

> I'd just like to see the backing source numbers.

That was the question, but the answer is on his stolen laptop :-)

Regards,

Brian.

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