[cmNOG] [AfPIF2015] Maputo AFPIF 2015 & Beijing Athletics 2015

[sylvain aboka baya]

Hi @ll,
[Salut @tou(te)s]Please find below, an interesting report about AfPIF2015.
[Prière de trouver en dessous, un excellent rapport concernant la 6ième édition du Forum AfPIF]
Regards,
--sb.

 

      Le Lundi 31 août 2015 12h59, via "afpif-request at afpif.org" <afpif-request at afpif.org>, Meoli Kashorda a écrit :  

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Today's Topics:

  1. Maputo AFPIF 2015 & Beijing Athletics 2015 (Meoli Kashorda)
Dear colleagues,

The 6th AFPIF 2015 this past week in Maputo was the biggest (232 participants?) and most exciting forum that I have attended so far (I have attend 5 of 6 AFPIFs). See  https://www.internetsociety.org/afpif-2015/home). Niger NREN and WACREN were represented by Musa Tessa of Niger, MoreNET by the CEO Salvador Adriano and KENET and UbuntuNet Alliance were represented by myself and Hillary Cheserek. See #AFPIF2015 for more details. Meeting people who are building Internet infrastructures in Africa was exciting. 

East Africa seems to have made a lot of progress in Africa in the past 12 months. KOOBA (http://www.koobaafrica.com/data-centres) announced that they were building a 2MW data center in Mombasa that will be operational end of Q1 2016 (it will grow to 6 MW) at a cost of $25 million. Icolo.io (www.icolo.io) another data center company in Kenya was building yet another 2 MW data center at Catholic University of Eastern Africa (the host of IBM Africa research lab) that will be operational Q3 2016. These are all carrier neutral data centers of same size as the East African Data Center, classified as the first carrier-neutral data center in Kenya. I think they are targeting the East African region countries that are growing their broadcasting/video, sports, educational and government content that will require large carrier-neutral data centers. 

Cloudfare (https://www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn), one of the leading global CDNs now has a presence in Mombasa at Seacom CLS. This was all exciting news and was one of the benefits of attending AFPIF 2015 (quite apart from visiting beautiful and growing Maputo). It means that NRENs and universities in EA might not need to invest in expensive data centers - we can focus on our missions!

I also learned that Angola Cables were building an undersea fiber cable from Angola and Brazil, 6000 KM, without a consortium or external funding (talk about the wealth in Africa). That will give Africa an alternative route to North America, the source of most of our content. It will be ready in 2016!

The issue of locally relevant content was also discussed. It is clear that sports news is classified as locally relevant content, even when generated in Europe or China.  One of the TV stations in Kenya ranks the top 10 Google searches by Kenyans every Sunday and sports are always among the top 10. I believe the Beijing Athletics 2015 championships that were taking place in China in the week we were at AFPIF 2015 will be in the top Google search in Kenya (see http://www.iaafbeijing2015.com/en/). 

Kenya and Ethiopia were among the top 10 global medal finalists, with Kenya at the top with 7 Gold medals beating the usual suspects of Jamaica, US and other developed countries with the highest number of medals. And there was another Internet story - Julius Yego who got Gold in Javelin is reported to have used YouTube video to learn the sport (he is only 25). He did not even have broadband Internet three years ago - only 3G Internet (download videos and watch later). 

So we had a good week in Maputo and in Beijing online - the conference had a 1 Gb/s Internet supplied by SEACOM, so we could stream whatever we wanted. This is now going to be the minimum for African conferences!

Congratulations to Eduardo Mondlane University (our local host university in Maputo and member of MoRENET) and Internet Society the organizers. The next one in 2016 shall be Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, another East African country with highest number of neighboring countries in EA. 

I cannot wait to learn about the Internet developments of the next 12 months at AFPIF 2016. We have so much potential for growth in Africa! 

Kind regards

Meoli Kashorda
KENET



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De: Meoli Kashorda <mkashorda at kenet.or.ke>
Objet: [Afpif] Maputo AFPIF 2015 & Beijing Athletics 2015
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 20:22:11 +0300 (EAT)
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