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African ISPs Being Fleeced by the West
dipfan writes "African ISPs are forced to pay the full cost of their connections to western telcos and ISPs, rather than sharing the costs, as in the case of voice telephony: quote - "America Online doesn't spend one single cent in sending emails to Africa." The total cost of any email sent or received by an African internet user is borne entirely by the African ISPs, totaling $500m a year for the continent, according to this disturbing article by the BBC."
This also happens with Traffic to OZ, and I'd guess most other countries.
The bottom line, is most English content providers are in the US (like slashdot), and if you want to see it you'd better pay.
I'd guess that China and other non english countries would have the best change at getting costs equalised, as they don't need the US site to the same extent.
I live and work for a telecoms co in South Africa, but have been to Tanzania (mid-eastern Africa) twice recently and I have seen this. These people still have to battle for basic survival , but they're being exploited in all possible ways by the UK, Japan and even the US. They pay more for their mobile calls or internet access than most other countries.And like the article say: Ussually the costs get shared between connecting telco companies, but that is not the case there. That is really terrible.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
That's not to say that prices haven't come down: They're a mere fraction of what they were before the Southern Cross Cable Consortium finished laying their cable. But the cost of wholesale bandwidth here is still 3 - 5 times the cost of the same amount of bandwidth in the US, because nobody in the US pays anything to see the rest of the world, whereas the whole world pays the full cost of getting to the US.
Or, putting it another way, consumers in 6 continents are subsidizing Internet access charges for the residents of North America.
A simple "Thank you" will suffice :-)
- mark
Network Engineer, Internode
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I tried an internal modem, but it hurt when I walked.
Phone costs aren't quite shared. They are set by the local countries and the US prices are set close to that. Where you have goverments that insist on high taxes on calls (like Egypt), the rates to call there are high. In other places where the taxes aren't as high (like the UK), the rates are some of the lowest.
Didn't you know, the cause of all the world's problems fall on the US. It's the "it couldn't possibly be our fault" syndrome worldwide. And silly me thought it was just videogames.
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They probably do. They certainly did so in the past, and they are doing it to about every country in the world, except Canada and maybe Mexico.
The operative word is "Tier 1". Let me explain a bit:
typically an ISP has three types of connections: "Customers" pay him to route their traffic, "Peers" are other ISPs who exchange traffic with him for their respective customers at no cost, and "upstream providers" are ISPs he pays to route all traffic from his customers he can't route via Peers.
A Tier 1 ISP, now, has zero upstream connections. He doesn't need to.
To meet this definition, a Tier 1 ISP has peering conections to every other Tier1 ISP. There are only very few ISPs that meet this criteria. All of them are US ISPs (though some of these - like UUNET - are globally active nowadays). Life is good for a Tier 1 ISP, since he only pays for his backbone (as everybody else does), and doesn't pay for traffic at all. And they have no incentive to let anyone else into the club - since they can earn more by forcing others to pay them for routing their traffic. Therefore it is practically impossible for an ISP to become Tier 1 ISP, even if he sits in the US, because the big guys simply won't peer with him. (For a more complex - albeit 3 years old - treatise, try this article ). More so, this applies to Non-US ISPs. Not only is there less incentive for the existing Tier1 ISPs to peer with them coompared to US ISPs (because US customers generally demand less access to foreign sites) but also the cost of shared cost peering is much higher, since the lines are longer - often across an ocean - and therefore more expensive.
As a result of this there is - AFAIK - not a single Non-US Tier 1 ISP. We all pay for upstream bandwidth - you don't.
Now look at this from a country based view: everyone pays for connection to the US, and for all traffic routed there, while US companies essentially get international connectivity for free. As a result of this Internet connectivity is much less expensive in the US then in any other part of the world.
This is even though the US today already is a minority on the Internet, and if not, certainly will be very soon. It is this way, because that Tier 1 Old Boys Network got started in the US, and these guys won't let anybody else in.
So the African Countries' complaint is correct, as should be the complaint of any state outside of North America. And at some point in the future, expect to see drastic political action to rectify this.
My personal suspicion is that this will start in China, but the bets are still open.
f.
It doesn't make any sense for first world ISPs to pay for third world connectivity. There isn't enough demand here for links to backwaters to justify paying for them. Overseas, there's plenty of demand to be connected to us. If I were a shareholder in a US telco, I'd be upset if the board weren't looking out for my interests. Foreign subsidies like this aren't the realm of corporations, but governments. Do Africans want to take a collective $500 million effective drop in their foreign aid just to lower their net access cost? Washigton will happily fund it, but not in addition to whatever the hell else they're handing out.
I checked out one site in Africa- the one the Nigerian government put up about their scam. That was for a moment's entertainment, not something I feel like paying for their bandwidth to see. I, and the vast majority of Americans, simply do not demand any pipe, much less a fat one, to Africa. Africans want a pipe to America. Why should my ISP pay for 50% of the pipe when they only represent 0.08% of the demand?
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.