![\"blog-post-dw-response\"](\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20150824200558im_\/https:\/\/angani.co\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/blog-post-dw-response.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
David Weekly highlights the issue of high Internet access latency in emerging markets in his interesting and topical (for us!) Facebook post<\/a>. \u00a0We are glad that David\u2019s post managed to generate much discussion all round. This is the core reason we started Angani \u2013 to provide a robust, scalable and more importantly a local environment to host data on the continent.<\/p>\n Africa as a continent accounts for only 3% of all Internet traffic in the world. As a result, it remains out of everyone\u2019s mind when it comes to getting their content closer to their users. This results in poor user experiences, and more so much higher costs of bandwidth, since all traffic has to traverse expensive transit and submarine links to reach datacenters in Europe or the US.<\/p>\n In David\u2019s article, he advocates the use of edge caching as a technical lever for mitigating the access latency problem. While we agree with his position we believe a broader treatment is required to effectively tackle the problem at a continental scale.<\/p>\n Latency<\/b><\/p>\n To begin with, it\u2019s important to point out that we\u2019re in a \u201cGolden age\u201d of latency. Just 5 years ago it was typical that the \u201cbest case\u201d round-trip latency experienced on satellite links was in the order of 700ms, so by that respect 150ms is excellent.<\/i> \u00a0Nevertheless, given that the human eye requires 150-200ms toregister<\/a> something on the screen you will agree 150ms is still quite high.<\/p>\n Furthermore, 150ms is, unfortunately, \u00a0typically the best-case round-trip latency you\u2019ll experience. Given the large physical distance between Africa and the rest of the world physical propagation delay (5ns per metre) quickly begins to affect latency, not to mention the buffering and network congestion issues prevalent at the network layer. Coupled with this, poor peering arrangements between Africa and the rest of the world further exacerbate the latency problem.<\/p>\n In practice, we\u2019ve found, in East Africa at least, latency is the single biggest chokehold preventing SMEs adopting and effectively using the cloud for their real-time applications such as ERPs. \u00a0[Fig1] shows you how bad it is, providing round-trip times from our data centre in Nairobi to various endpoints in the world as collected in Q1 2014. Of particular interest is the fact that the latency to anything that isn\u2019t in Europe or the USA is exceedingly high.<\/p>\n While users on the continent continue to benefit from technical optimizations designed to reduce latency in the common case (e.g. TCP Fast Open, HTTP keep-alive, QUIC etc), it is clear overcoming the latency problem is an important step to realizing wide-scale and prevalent cloud adoption in the region. \u00a0It should therefore come as no surprise to you that latency reduction is one of the major tenets on which we started Angani. We\u2019re all<\/i> about reducing latency<\/a> as the first 10G open commercial platform in the region and we\u2019ve put a lot of effort and time into making sure we can turn around a packet in < 100us on our network. We have done all this because<\/i> we strongly believe that providing a local, low access-latency platform on which SMEs, start-ups and large incumbents can host, deploy and use cloud based applications is an essential component to making Kenya a cloud first and first-class cloud country!<\/p>\n Bandwidth Costs<\/b><\/p>\n In effect, when accessing content that\u2019s in-country, you are only paying for last mile connectivity (fiber or 3G), whereas accessing content out-of-country means your ISP has to pay the cost of the submarine cable, long-distance fiber and IP Transit costs necessary to connect your machine to the datacenter you\u2019re accessing.<\/p>\n These costs add up to constitute the per Megabit bandwidth cost that operators bear and charge their customers. A 1Gb port at the local Exchange Point \u2013 KIXP costs $350, so per megabit cost for local in-country content stands at $0.35, compared to international submarine cable access which costs $200 per megabit. Just think about that again \u2013 $0.35 vs $200.<\/p>\n This is the core reason why localization of content is important. Google has rolled out Google Global Caches (GGC) in most African countries. This has resulted in operators saving up to 30% of their bandwidth costs, because now traffic to YouTube doesn\u2019t have to travel through expensive international links to datacenters in Europe. Akamai \u2013 a global CDN provider \u2013 also setup a node in Kenya a couple of years ago (after being begged to do so for over 10 years!). This realized an additional 15-20% savings for the ISPs.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n