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I realize that Africa is an enormous continent; I'm just curious if this doesn't also help out developers and startups in places like Nigeria...? I don't have a

I realize that Africa is an enormous continent; I'm just curious if this doesn't also help out developers and startups in places like Nigeria...? I don't have a sense of the topology of the Internet throughout Africa vs particular African nations and the rest of the world.

SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
The backbone topology is mapped here https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ I linked to it in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300309 The backbone cables loop around the coast of Africa. Cape Town is on that coast. So is Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria, the most populous country. But the most populous area and economic hub of South Africa is around Johannesburg, which is far from the coast. We assume that AWS took the decision that the South African economy today was more important than the Nigerian economy; this data centre won't be much closer to Nigeria than European data centres are. Or maybe the double distance, double lag time at South Africa is a bigger reduction to eliminate. This press release https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2018/10/an-aws-region-is-coming-to-south-africa.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2018/10/an-aws-region-i... says "The new AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will ... provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa" We can assume that this statement is truer the further south of the Sahara you go ;)
- ma2rten 8y ago
  The backbone cables loop around the coast of Africa. I believe you that this is the case, but the map you linked is a submarine cable map. If there were backbone ables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
    > If there were backbone cables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up (on that map of submarine cables) Good point. I haven't found a lot of resource on this topic. The exception, which discusses the growth of terrestrial networks is this: http://www.africabandwidthmaps.com/?p=5505 http://www.africabandwidthmaps.com/?p=5505 e.g. > Of the total activated/ sold bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 3.065 Tbps (92.3%) was supplied directly by submarine cable. > Of the total bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 248 Gbps (7.5%) was supplied by terrestrial cross-border networks connected to submarine cables. The completion of new cross-border links, and the expansion of capacity on others, has seen the volume of intra-regional traffic backhauled to submarine cable landing points increase by 65% in the last year I note also this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301912 > I believe at present most traffic between Nigeria and South Africa transits London Simply, the network is at present not optimised for traffic between e.g. Johannesburg and Lagos. Why would it be? There's not a lot of it. An internet user in Johannesburg is mostly either going to look at domestic websites in SA, or the "top 1000" sites, hosted in EU and USA. I hope that this will change over time, and better data centres in Africa is part of that.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      > There's not a lot of it. If internet traffic is anything like road traffic then the presence of a highway would generate more traffic. Having a crappy connection pretty much guarantees that there is little traffic!
  - thatcloudguy 8y ago
    There isn't much overland cable in Africa. The distance is too far to maintain in a cost effective way.
  - Havoc 8y ago
    There are no overland backbones to my knowledge. At least not in the continuous sense - I suppose you could patch together a web of adjacent country networks. Country internal there is a pretty good web of them, mostly to connect cellphone towers. In reality everything goes via the submarine cables though. It's easier than fighting through the landrights of 6,000 miles of sometimes shaky countries.
  - sangnoir 8y ago
    > If there were backbone ables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up. There are, and the information in sibling comments is either wrong or outdated. Liquid has a fiber network that literally stretches from "Cape to Cairo"[1]. Liquid has a presence in Nigeria, but it's not connected to the overland fiber network [1] https://www.liquidtelecom.com/about-us/network-map.html https://www.liquidtelecom.com/about-us/network-map.html
    - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
      That's very interesting, thanks. And also fairly new? > covering Africa's fastest-growing economies, where no fixed network has ever existed before.
      - sangnoir 8y ago
        Yes, it's fairly new. The build-out was done in the last ~ 3-5 years, but it was only lit in stages within the past 2 years.
- lukeschlather 8y ago
  AWS has had an engineering office in South Africa for a very long time. The decision may be more pragmatic than anything.
ti_ranger 8y ago
> I realize that Africa is an enormous continent; I'm just curious if this doesn't also help out developers and startups in places like Nigeria...? I don't have a sense of the topology of the Internet throughout Africa vs particular African nations and the rest of the world. It probably doesn't help developers in Nigeria get lower latency or cheaper access to AWS, but it may help them get more customers more quickly, as some other obvious markets that might be a better fit for services they develop would benefit from the region in South Africa. However, it is quite expensive to operate data centres in Nigeria (as the electrical supply is not very reliable; I know that at least quite recently many DCs there need to run on generator about 10% of the time, I don't know if that has changed since). There are, however, some initiatives to get more international intra-continental peering going (e.g. I believe at present most traffic between Nigeria and South Africa transits London).
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
  > data centres in Nigeria ... the electrical supply is not very reliable Electrical supply in Cape Town has had issues too: https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding I expect that data centers will use a lot of power in summer when the temperature outside gets around 40 C (over 100 F)
  - nostrebored 8y ago
    Large swathes of the Western Cape have very reliable electricity, and I would assume that these areas are being targeted for availability zones
  - ti_ranger 8y ago
    > > data centres in Nigeria ... the electrical supply is not very reliable > Electrical supply in Cape Town has had issues too: https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding Oh wow, one day of residential load shedding in the past year. Nigeria had a country-wide electrical outage this year: https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/254308-updated-nigeria-experiences-total-power-outage-across-country.html https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/254308-updated... A few years ago, I was somewhat involved with some data centres in Nigeria, which ran on generators 2-3 times a day for at last an hour each time, every day, for more than a year, due to the electrical grid in the city (Lagos) going down. The locals indicated that this was normal (e.g. had been like this for years). Ghana has much more reliable electricity than Nigeria. A few more articles: http://dailypost.ng/2018/07/24/nigeria-may-not-stable-power-next-5-years-electricity-distributors/ http://dailypost.ng/2018/07/24/nigeria-may-not-stable-power-... https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-challenge-keeping-nigerias-lights/ https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-challenge-keepi... "To cope with the frequent blackouts and lack of access, a quarter of Nigerians relied on generators in 2016" South Africa's electricity generation (Eskom) has problems, but nothing like Nigeria's (yet).

SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago

The backbone topology is mapped here https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ I linked to it in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300309 The backbone cables loop around the coast of Africa. Cape Town is on that coast. So is Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria, the most populous country. But the most populous area and economic hub of South Africa is around Johannesburg, which is far from the coast. We assume that AWS took the decision that the South African economy today was more important than the Nigerian economy; this data centre won't be much closer to Nigeria than European data centres are. Or maybe the double distance, double lag time at South Africa is a bigger reduction to eliminate. This press release https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2018/10/an-aws-region-is-coming-to-south-africa.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2018/10/an-aws-region-i... says "The new AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will ... provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa" We can assume that this statement is truer the further south of the Sahara you go ;)

ma2rten 8y ago
The backbone cables loop around the coast of Africa. I believe you that this is the case, but the map you linked is a submarine cable map. If there were backbone ables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up.
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
  > If there were backbone cables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up (on that map of submarine cables) Good point. I haven't found a lot of resource on this topic. The exception, which discusses the growth of terrestrial networks is this: http://www.africabandwidthmaps.com/?p=5505 http://www.africabandwidthmaps.com/?p=5505 e.g. > Of the total activated/ sold bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 3.065 Tbps (92.3%) was supplied directly by submarine cable. > Of the total bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 248 Gbps (7.5%) was supplied by terrestrial cross-border networks connected to submarine cables. The completion of new cross-border links, and the expansion of capacity on others, has seen the volume of intra-regional traffic backhauled to submarine cable landing points increase by 65% in the last year I note also this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301912 > I believe at present most traffic between Nigeria and South Africa transits London Simply, the network is at present not optimised for traffic between e.g. Johannesburg and Lagos. Why would it be? There's not a lot of it. An internet user in Johannesburg is mostly either going to look at domestic websites in SA, or the "top 1000" sites, hosted in EU and USA. I hope that this will change over time, and better data centres in Africa is part of that.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    > There's not a lot of it. If internet traffic is anything like road traffic then the presence of a highway would generate more traffic. Having a crappy connection pretty much guarantees that there is little traffic!
- thatcloudguy 8y ago
  There isn't much overland cable in Africa. The distance is too far to maintain in a cost effective way.
- Havoc 8y ago
  There are no overland backbones to my knowledge. At least not in the continuous sense - I suppose you could patch together a web of adjacent country networks. Country internal there is a pretty good web of them, mostly to connect cellphone towers. In reality everything goes via the submarine cables though. It's easier than fighting through the landrights of 6,000 miles of sometimes shaky countries.
- sangnoir 8y ago
  > If there were backbone ables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up. There are, and the information in sibling comments is either wrong or outdated. Liquid has a fiber network that literally stretches from "Cape to Cairo"[1]. Liquid has a presence in Nigeria, but it's not connected to the overland fiber network [1] https://www.liquidtelecom.com/about-us/network-map.html https://www.liquidtelecom.com/about-us/network-map.html
  - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
    That's very interesting, thanks. And also fairly new? > covering Africa's fastest-growing economies, where no fixed network has ever existed before.
    - sangnoir 8y ago
      Yes, it's fairly new. The build-out was done in the last ~ 3-5 years, but it was only lit in stages within the past 2 years.
lukeschlather 8y ago
AWS has had an engineering office in South Africa for a very long time. The decision may be more pragmatic than anything.

ti_ranger 8y ago

> I realize that Africa is an enormous continent; I'm just curious if this doesn't also help out developers and startups in places like Nigeria...? I don't have a sense of the topology of the Internet throughout Africa vs particular African nations and the rest of the world. It probably doesn't help developers in Nigeria get lower latency or cheaper access to AWS, but it may help them get more customers more quickly, as some other obvious markets that might be a better fit for services they develop would benefit from the region in South Africa. However, it is quite expensive to operate data centres in Nigeria (as the electrical supply is not very reliable; I know that at least quite recently many DCs there need to run on generator about 10% of the time, I don't know if that has changed since). There are, however, some initiatives to get more international intra-continental peering going (e.g. I believe at present most traffic between Nigeria and South Africa transits London).

SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
> data centres in Nigeria ... the electrical supply is not very reliable Electrical supply in Cape Town has had issues too: https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding I expect that data centers will use a lot of power in summer when the temperature outside gets around 40 C (over 100 F)
- nostrebored 8y ago
  Large swathes of the Western Cape have very reliable electricity, and I would assume that these areas are being targeted for availability zones
- ti_ranger 8y ago
  > > data centres in Nigeria ... the electrical supply is not very reliable > Electrical supply in Cape Town has had issues too: https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding Oh wow, one day of residential load shedding in the past year. Nigeria had a country-wide electrical outage this year: https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/254308-updated-nigeria-experiences-total-power-outage-across-country.html https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/254308-updated... A few years ago, I was somewhat involved with some data centres in Nigeria, which ran on generators 2-3 times a day for at last an hour each time, every day, for more than a year, due to the electrical grid in the city (Lagos) going down. The locals indicated that this was normal (e.g. had been like this for years). Ghana has much more reliable electricity than Nigeria. A few more articles: http://dailypost.ng/2018/07/24/nigeria-may-not-stable-power-next-5-years-electricity-distributors/ http://dailypost.ng/2018/07/24/nigeria-may-not-stable-power-... https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-challenge-keeping-nigerias-lights/ https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-challenge-keepi... "To cope with the frequent blackouts and lack of access, a quarter of Nigerians relied on generators in 2016" South Africa's electricity generation (Eskom) has problems, but nothing like Nigeria's (yet).