From OKORO CHINEDU in Lagos, Nigeria
LAGOS, (CAJ News) – MAIN-ONE, West Africa’s provider of connectivity and data centre solutions, has reiterated the importance of internet traffic domiciliation as a key requirement for growing the internet ecosystem in Africa.
Speaking at the just-concluded African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF), MainOne’s Chief Executive Officer, Funke Opeke, challenged Africa’s leading internet players to exchange traffic locally, noting this would significantly lower costs and improve performance.
“Africa needs to retain more local traffic within the continent to drive more value from the internet,” she said in Lagos.
This, she said, could be achieved by leveraging robust Internet Exchange Points and access via local interconnection points and local data centres.
This would provide a platform for different networks to directly interconnect with other operators and exchange traffic, guaranteeing lower bandwidth costs, quicker access to more content providers and carriers and lower latency for local markets.
During her keynote address titled “Vision 80/20 by 2020”, which approached the goal set by AfPIF to route 80 percent of Africa’s internet traffic on the continent by the year 2020, Opeke rued the current ecosystem of routing over 80 percent of the internet traffic from Nigeria abroad.
This was incurring expensive transit costs and increasing service latency.
According to her, transactions initiated in Africa typically left the sender for a long journey outside the continent, usually to Europe,
America or Asia before returning to target recipient.
Industry experts meanwhile urged for regulatory incentives to increase private and public peering at local exchanges to boost internet traffic, which is guaranteed to create and improve the ease of doing business across the continent and boost economic growth.
– CAJ News
