Kenya currently leads in African
connectivity with the highest bandwidth per person on the continent, the
fastest speeds, and some of the lowest internet costs, according to a
presentation held by Liquid Telecom Kenya CEO Ben Roberts, at the EastAfrica.com
conference in Nairobi.
“Investment in the continent’s connectivity is creating multiple
benefits that Kenya demonstrates as a clear example of a virtuous circle, where
each investment accelerates the next, with an ever increasing footprint of
beneficiaries,” said Roberts.
Following on from the connection of
the continent’s most concentrated cluster of undersea cables; the galloping
development of the Kenyan Internet Exchange Point; the creation of thousands of
Points of Presence by international and national service and content providers
– delivering speedier content; and the achievement of the second cheapest
internet costs on the continent, Kenya has now emerged in the top position in
Africa for internet access.
“Kenya has achieved a confluence of
infrastructure and provision that has positioned it with the highest growth in
internet take-up compared to income per capita in Africa,” said Mr Roberts. “It
has effectively become an outlier in its internet take-up, and seen Nairobi
join Johannesburg as one of Africa’s two regional internet hubs.”
Research commissioned by the Internet
Society and published in May last year further found that East Africa offers
the lowest internet costs on the continent, with Kenya the cheapest in the
region.
In its report on ‘Lifting Barriers to Internet Development in
Africa”, the Internet Society found that Kenya had outperformed in surmounting
a series of infrastructure barriers to arrive at its now emerging internet
leadership.
The country has more undersea cables
than any other nation on the East African coast, with government support having
been directed at increasing access and participation by more carriers. The
landing of the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy), The East African
Marine System (TEAMS), SEACOM and LION high-capacity submarine cables brought a
20-fold increase in international bandwidth in the country to 20Gbit per
second.
Kenya also has more licensed
international gateways than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa, now at 13,
in total, according to the Internet Society.
The localisation of internet
connections through the Kenya Internet Exchange Point (KIXP) has also been
critical to Kenya’s emerging internet leadership. KIXP allows local internet
users to interconnect locally, without traffic being pointed back to the US or
Europe. The Kenyan exchange is now localising more than 1Gbit/s of peak
traffic, dramatically reducing latency from 200-600ms to 2-10ms on average,
while allowing ISPs to save almost $1.5m per year on international
connectivity, and to make revenue gains on increased internet usage – on faster
speeds – of as much as $6m a year per operator.
In 2011, Google installed a Google
Global Cache (GGC) in Kenya, retaining static content, such as YouTube videos,
after it has been downloaded in Kenya, which has also had a significant impact
on ISP traffic levels. For example, the Internet Society reported that the
educational network, KENET, experienced a roughly ten-fold increase in Google
usage, from 20Megabits per second to 200Megabits per second, after the cache
was established, attributing the rise to better speeds.
Shifting content and routing to the
local exchange has similarly impacted the mobile operators. According to an
‘Assessment of the Impact of Internet Exchange Points – Empirical Study of
Kenya and Nigeria by the Internet Society’, one operator alone is seeing a
revenue increase of just under $6,000,000 a year from the rise in locally
routed Internet traffic.
The country has benefited in much
broader ways again from its rapid embrace of local internet infrastructure. The
Kenya Revenue Authority used local routing that saw 160,524 citizens file their
income taxes online in the first half of fiscal year 2011, and 5,000 users
register for the customs, system, representing 95 per cent of the industry.
Technology, according to the taxman, has been key in assisting it meet its tax
collection targets.
The benefits of the KIXP are also
beginning to extend beyond Kenya’s borders. As of January 2012, 56 per cent of
the Autonomous System numbers routed through the KIXP in the previous six
months were from 16 foreign countries, ranging from Botswana to Zimbabwe, and
as far away as the United States.
Cross-border terrestrial networks are
also expanding rapidly in Africa. Carriers still largely use intra-African
capacity to connect with submarine cable stations for onward transit to Europe,
rather than to facilitate the exchange of African traffic, but this is
beginning to change.
“The investment in this key
national and local infrastructure is absolutely key to further increasing
African internet speeds and reducing the cost of internet use to all users,”
said Mr Roberts.
Liquid Telecom’s fibre network now
stretches over 17,000kms across country borders, including the first ever
regional fibre ring connecting the east African countries to each other and the
rest of the world.
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