MDXi, West Africa’s leading data centre provider, said users’ online experience can be greatly improved by leveraging the opportunities offered by the growing edge data centre ecosystem.
The edge data centre ecosystem is enabling players exchange traffic on the African continent.
Gbenga Adegbiji, general manager of MDXi was speaking at the Data Centre Dynamics Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. He explained that leveraging the ecosystem will significantly lower costs, improve performance of the existing content ecosystem and enable new technology use cases in Africa such as electronic gaming, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and big data.
He also noted that Africa boasts some of the biggest opportunities including a population of 1.3 billion people, the fastest growing digital consumer market, estimated to reach 600 million within the next seven years and 6 to 7 per cent GDP growth by 2020.
Read also: Oyo waste management system technology driven ― Mottainai
Already, local data centres have found innovative ways to deal with Africa’s most pressing problems including power generation through by-passing traditional transmission and distribution bottlenecks with direct grid connections. There is also the existence of local colocation facilities to meet hyperscale requirements. These activities have also earned recognition of the global community with awards being given to the high performers. Some of the awards include Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS), Uptime Institute’s Tier III Constructed Facility Certification (TCCF), as well as ISO 9001 and 27001 certifications.
“With Africa’s largest economy (90% of Anglophone West Africa’s GDP), third most populous nation by 2050, and 8th global internet user country with 45 per cent of Africa users, Nigeria is a natural and strategic destination for West Africa-focused hyperscale players to offer real-time data processing at the edge,” Adegbiji said.
He further noted that with robust Internet Exchange Points (ISPs) and access via local interconnection points, data centres such as MDXi provide a platform for different networks to directly interconnect with other operators and exchange traffic in Nigeria to guarantee lower bandwidth costs and improved margins for content owners and OTTs, quicker access to more content providers and carriers as well as lower latency and improved experience for local users.
