Kenya and Nigeria IXPs Approaching the Final Stages of a Developed Internet Ecosystem

Eight years ago, only 30% of Kenya and Nigeria’s internet traffic remained in-country with Google Global Cache providing the only static international content. Today they have roughly 70% of traffic being exchanged locally. The exchange of this traffic occurs at Intenet Exchange Points (IXPs), namely KIXP and IXPN in Kenya and Nigeria respectively.

Stages of Internet Ecosystem Development

 

Source - Anchoring the African Internet Ecosystem: Lessons from Kenya and Nigeria’s Internet Exchange Point Growth by Michael Kende (Internet Society)

The Internet Society (ISOC) defines 3 stages of internet ecosystem development, determined by what percentage of the total internet traffic is localized, as seen in the above figure. In 2012, Kenya and Nigeria were in Stage1 and are today at the advanced phases of Stage2. A report by Michael Kende was launched earlier this week by ISOC detailing how such exponential growth was achieved.

The ISOC’s team in Africa had set themselves a goal of 80% localized traffic by 2020. Back in 2010 when this goal was set, anyone who follows African news would have dismissed it as pie in the sky. This great achievement calls for a detailed read of the report and forms a blueprint that can be adopted by other African countries who are still building their internet ecosystem.

The coming years will focus on seeing 80% of Africa internet traffic being locally accessed. The following are some of the key action points that need to be addressed to achieve this:

• Raise awareness of the benefits of local content hosting and peering at IXPs
• Local content developers who are currently hosting their content outside their countries should bring the content back home and have consumers enjoy lower latency
• Smaller Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should have presence at IXPs and peer with others as efficiently as possible
• Aggregation of demand for backbone capacity in and between cities. A pool of small ISPs can buy backbone capacity in bulk and enjoy volume discounts for instance
• Aggregate local content providers and acquire hosting services from them
• Extend domestic backbone infrastructure beyond the main landing point for submarine cables and main population center into other population centers
• Further strengthen the foundation of trust and collaboration amongst stakeholders

We often complain about Africa’s undocumented achievements. The amount of evolution of the internet ecosystems in these countries in such a short period should be widely celebrated. Both the work done in the past 8 years by all stakeholders and the reporting of it by ISOC are important milestones in the continent’s Growth and History of the Internet.