AfPIF 2015: Lessons learnt

The 6th African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) was held in the Girassol Indy Congress Hotel & SPA, Maputo, Mozambique on the 25th through the 27th of August, 2015. It was themed “The Lessons Learnt”.

The African Internet Peering and Interconnection Forum could be characterized as a multi-stakeholder forum that seeks to build cross-border interconnection opportunities for Internet service providers (ISPs), carriers and transit providers, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), Data centre Operators, international financial institutions, policymakers, and regulators from Africa.

Driving this yearly forum is the Internet Society (ISOC) which has positioned this forum as a non-profit event.

There were several highlights of this event. However, aligning with the theme for this year’s event, it may be appropriate to focus on the takeaways from the event.

It is worthy of note that1,000Mbps (1Gbps) of internet bandwidth was provided at this year’s AfPIF conference. Apart from the very fast speed of the internet, there was a high quality event streaming, and a large online participation. (AFPIF2015 had 232 participants from 57 countries and 40 African countries. Online participants were 978 from 77 countries.)

Over 99 percent of internet content consumed in Africa today is foreign. Also, over 90 percent of African content is hosted outside of Africa. The Internet Society’s (ISOC) Interconnection Vision for African traffic exchange is to attain an 80 percent local and 20 percent international traffic balance by 2020.

The drive to ensure that local internet peering (the local interconnection of networks belonging to ISPs and network providers) is achieving its desired objectives was noticed in the East African and South African contributions during the forum. The exchanges in these regions provided sufficient measurement data to drive improvement. This highlights the need for improvements in neutral internet measurement systems in Nigeria. The increase of gaming and IPTV services all across Africa makes this bilateral peering an imperative for Nigeria with far-reaching benefits for end-users and the market.

With the growth of Fiber to the homes and LTE networks, we are likely to see an exponential growth in traffic in Africa and Nigeria so network providers need to be ready to move to 40G/100Gbps backbone networks on or before 2016/2017. This will also mean that the IXPN (the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria) will need to be ready for 10G connections in Nigeria. (The IXPN is already working on this project.)

There are quite a lot of activities taking place in East and Southern Africa with respect to the internet development. West Africa has not done enough marketing of some of its internet initiatives. This was highlighted a number of times during the conference. The low representation from West Africa did not go unnoticed (excluding online participants). With increased participation from the youth in the internet community, there is bound to be more creative and strategic ideas that will drive the overall internet growth and future participation by West African countries.

Regulators in the African continent ought to play an active role to ensure that organizations are not keeping “must-have” internet content in their exclusive contracts. At the same time a framework that ensures balanced investments by as many interested parties will need to be worked out to ensure the vibrancy of the content market. On the contrary, excessive regulation can create a whole set of perverse incentives. Governments must therefore be very careful not to kill the benefits of value and service improvements that healthy competition brings. Healthy competition in the internet market is one of the factors that lead to increased internet penetration levels.

With the rollout of LTE services in Africa, AFRINIC is committed to providing the necessary support for the release of IPV4 address blocks to prevent the use of NATTED networks. Nigerian network providers must be knowledgeable about this to take advantage of it, especially considering the very low subscription of Nigeria to AFRINIC IP/ASN resources. (I also learned that Nigeria has one of the most NATTED networks in the world – a problem which requires some attention.) The African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) is the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Africa, responsible for the distribution and management of internet number resources such as IP addresses and ASN (Autonomous System Numbers) for the African region.

Data caps on wireline service should decrease over time in Africa, especially with the growth of LTE services. Research has consistently shown that as people know that they can do more without the restriction of data caps, they almost always do more on the internet thereby creating more opportunities on the Internet for all. (The history of data caps on wireless services is understood considering the limited availability of broadband frequencies to operators.)

Out of the 54 countries in Africa, there are 33 active IXPs (internet exchange points) in 25 countries. AfPIF 2016 goes to Tanzania. Ghana has been a host of this event before. Nigeria should target the hosting of AfPIF 2017 which comes to West Africa as the benefits for hosting an event of this nature are immense for the Nigerian internet market. We have a lot of work to do if this is to be achieved.

For more information on the AfPIF event you may visit https://www.internetsociety.org/afpif-2015/home

Chidinma Iwe