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STUDY ABROAD OPTIONS
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 ENSQUARED’S CRAIG LEVY ON LOCAL INTERNET EXCHANGES While South Africa has common Internet peering points - which helps with speed of delivery - the rest of Africa sorely lacks in this regard, leaving a big question mark over the continent’s ability to move into the digital age along with the rest of the world. So says Craig Levy, managing director of South Africa’s Ensquared, an IT consultancy focusing on the ISP (Internet Service Provider) and networking markets. "South Africa and Africa in particular should take a leaf out of the book of America’s Bellsouth, a company which is resolving network latency issues in the Southeastern US and speeding up Internet connections between the US and Latin America - where there is increasing Internet traffic - by installing new network access point (NAP) facilities in Florida." Traditionally NAPs, also called Internet Exchanges, are single physical locations housing routers and switches where major Internet providers connect. But the new BellSouth NAP, which the company is calling a Multimedia Internet Exchange (MIX), is based on a new distributed optical networking model with four facilities in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. This will give Florida businesses more flexibility in locating near a high-speed connections point and provide redundancy in the event of an outage, said Levy. This gives the company better wired and wireless connections to Latin America, a booming Internet market. "This is clever thinking and it is an approach we should take from the book of BellSouth," said Levy. "Right now when SA users access the USA via the most common mediums, such as dial-up, leased lines and ISDN they have to route via satellites and this leads to a 500 millisecond latency. This delays transmission. While this is not too bad, it is a lot worse when end users need to talk to Europe or Asia. Satellites have a minimum latency of 500 milliseconds to the USA - which is acceptable - but across Europe, Asia and Australasia, this often extends to beyond a second in terms of response times, which is really not acceptable. "Right now it is actually cheaper for any African country to go directly to the USA than peer directly into South African for Internet bandwidth. This is due to the extreme half circuit cost that Telkom charges for SA bandwidth ‘landing rights’. It does not make sense that our African neighbours could leverage off the most advanced Internet setup in Africa, yet they are forced to go elsewhere. However, once the boundaries are unlocked," said Levy, "the Internet in Africa will become more powerful from a business and communications perspective." It is evident that what BellSouth is doing is cutting down on latency and shortening the routing. We in SA have to shorten the gaps - especially to Europe and Asia. What some ISPs do," he said, "is use Telkom’s fibre optic link into Europe directly via Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP4) routing, thereby giving them a direct route to Europe. This is the kind of inventive thinking the local ISP market should be doing." At present no single ISP in SA has direct links to Asia, Australia and South America. All traffic is currently first routed to either the US or Europe. "At the moment," said Levy, "there is not enough business to justify direct links all over the world from an ISP point of view. As the race heats up within the local ISP market, the top players will, however, have to broaden their superhighways to new exciting destinations. MTN, for instance, has recently acquired Citec and, with their entry into Nigeria, we could possibly see the continent connected as the new generation networks have the ability to carry a combination of voice and data traffic.
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This page last updated on January 28 2004.
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