Context: Why is this project important?

The five national IXPs allow a number of ISPs to exchange traffic with one other, eliminating the need to go outside Africa to handle local Internet traffic, which accounts for an estimated 30% to 40% of all Internet traffic. To assess the impact of the IXPs, each will be supplied with a data collection node that will transmit data to a central archive in the United States operated by the Packet Clearing House, an American non-profit educational foundation. Using software tools developed for the project, Packet Clearing House will draw on the archived data to measure and analyze key usage factors, including the number of networks connecting to the IXP and their degree of interconnectedness, the growth rate of traffic, and the use of constrained resources such as IP address space.

The Project: How does this initiative address the development problem?

Africa has the most expensive Internet access in the world, partly because most African Internet traffic has to transit through Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in the U.S. or Europe, requiring African Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to pay long distance charges. To reduce these costs and to allow Africans to keep traffic local, African ISPs have established five national Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). The African Internet Service Provider Association (AfriSPA) expects that another 20 to 30 will be established by 2008. This 18-month long project will measure the impact of the existing five national IXPs. The data collected will make it possible to assess how national IXPs impact the cost of Internet access and local, regional and African traffic flows. The project team will produce quarterly reports summarizing and analyzing the patterns of traffic flows in each country, as well as an overview report on all-Africa traffic. The data will also be available through a public database.

Objectives:

National IXPs hold the promise of overcoming a major barrier to realizing the potential of ICTs for development in Africa—the high cost of Internet access. This project will measure and analyze Internet traffic through the five national African IXPs to assess if they are indeed changing traffic flows sufficiently to reduce costs and improve access to ICTs in disadvantaged African communities, and to identify ways to make improvements.

Development Impact

This project is expected to increase understanding of how IXPs lower the cost and improve the efficiency of African Internet access. The project data and analysis will help network operators and network equipment manufacturers improve efficiency by anticipating optimal memory and processor requirements for routers and other network equipment. New IXP operators will have a benchmark for building sound business cases. And many Africans will benefit from acquiring skills in network data collection and analysis, and from training materials and open source software tools co-produced by Packet Clearing House and AfriSPA. Together, these resources will increase the ability of Africans to successfully establish IXPs across the continent.

Outputs

Brian Longwe - the Africa’s best Business Man in ICT sector. 2007-12-17

Building Africa's Information Highway: African ISP Association Selects Regional Carriers 2005-07
This spring, AfrISPA, the Association of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Africa, announced the two successful bids in response to its call for proposals to provide direct Internet connections between African countries.