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."

Comments

Bad? yes. Rip off? No!

[JamesSharman]

For years this was true of Europe (And to a degree still is). The bulk of the transatlantic connectivity is still played for by European companies. This is the underlying reason why broadband and leased lines cost more here in Britain than in the states.

The situation has been gradually changing because there is demand in the US for some of the content being hosted in Europe, it will take a lot more time for the playing field to level out but it will eventually do so.

The African question is interesting, for the time being they are going to need to like it or lump it. I can't remember ever wanting to access an African website but my websites show quite a few hits from African domains. The situation for Africa is very much what it was for Europe a decade ago, they want to access the internet as it exists outside there country, it would be outright wrong to ask the rest of the world to pay for it.

As the African countries gain a larger online presence I'm sure people in the west will want to get at African sites, then they will start to go down the same road that Europe is now heading down.

Is this a tough barrier to entry into the Internet world? Yes. Should relevant authorities consider help and subsidies to help developing world deal with it? Yes. Is this a blatant attempt to rip of the Africa's of $500bn? Not even close.

Re:Can somebody help pay for my T1?

[Zocalo]

This is essentially the difference between getting a leased line from a Telco/ISP and peering. In the first case you can expect to pay for all the bandwidth in both directions, because essentially all the traffic on the line is yours. You are going to be making requests (I want to read Slashdot), people responding to your requests (here's your Slashdot Page) or people accessing services you are offering (your geek webpage just got linked by Slashdot). Peering on the otherhand involves you entering into an agreement that in exchange for routing another carriers traffic over part of the network that you provide and foot the bills for, they will let you send traffic over theirs. Think "quid pro quo" and you get the general idea - it's a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" arrangement in its most basic form.

In the specific case of the African nations this is quite likely to be unbalanaced; most big web hosts are in the US and, to a lesser extend, in Europe, so most of the traffic on the links to and from Africa is unlikely to contain data that falls into the "peering" catagory. I really don't think that the Africans are getting fleeced; they just don't have the traffic patterns to make peering financially viable to western carriers. When we see major data hosting centers on the dark continent, then we should see the carriers of those data centers getting into peering agreements, until then though they are going to have to pay. The truth is, it's not Africa being singled out at all; the same billing scheme applies in the US and Europe as well. Peering is for carriers, not companies or small ISPs that piggy back of a large one, and Africa just doesn't have too many of those at present.