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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."
The article didn't mention one specific rule or regulation about how costs are split up. Only thing that was written was how bad the western corporations are and so forth. Not one fact. So can anyone tell me how exactly is the west raping african ISP's? How are their payment schemes different than what network providers charge other customers?
Even worse is the fact that since Worldcom bought Embratel (the big Brazilian carrier) two years ago, they've cancelled all regional IP links we used to have. Now they want to force us into buying BW only to the US.
So, people living on the Uruguay-Brazil border have to go to USA to ping their accross-the-street neighbors. Quite an optimal network design in my humble opinion :-)
Western ISP's generally have peering arrangements - because the traffic between them is more symmetrical. It's still not free - it's just that they absorb the costs themselves instead of writing checks to one another that wash out. Anyplace where the demands are asymmetrical, there will be money paid from the smaller ISP to the larger one for the interconnection. Duh.
If and when Africa as a continent has resources that are compelling destinations for Western internet users, then the traffic loads will balance and the ISP's will come to arrangements where they peer with them instead of just billing them. Right now (at least according to my inbox), the biggest thing the African continent contributes to the Internet as a whole is "419" e-mails.
It's not a Western conspiracy to keep Africa subjugated. It's just math, folks. When two parties have roughly equal assets, they will work out a deal to trade with one another. When one has all the assets, the one without pays. Are you willing to subsidize another continent by having another buck or two tacked on to your cablemodem bill? They'd probably do better by deregulating their national telecom providers and cooperating with one another.
Nothing is stopping African nations from interconnecting and peering with one another, as the article kind of points out. If they rely on Western ISP's to interconnect with each other, they'll pay for the privilege.
The whole point of this article is that the head of Kenya's ISP association wants a handout. Not gonna happen.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Because they're not being asked to pay for what everyone else is paying already - they are being asked to pay what everyone else used to pay.
:o)
How many US ISPs (Not the big international carriers like UUNet etc) do you think pay for a leased line across the pond to the UK and peering to Europe or lines to Asia etc?
They don't. They peer with people in New York and San Francisco - Asian and European networks however have to install lines at least to the US to get any decent connectivity and they have to pay for that.
Things have started to change for Europe and Asia but the African nations are no doubt forced to get leased circuits at least into Linx or one of the other big EuroNAPs before they get any decent level of connectivity.
As Africa's internet connectivity is lagging behind Asia's which has lagged behind Europe's which has lagged behind the USA's they are having to go through the same high cost expansion that European and Asian networks went through to get to the stage where they are large enough for the major carriers to be interested in peering with them in their home countries.
What is needed is the large carriers, BT, UUnet, ATT etc to fund an AfrIX (trademark) and allow African networks to peer there. AfrIX could be connected to Linx and one of the big US peering points to allow direct peers. This would cut costs across the board.
M@t
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
no, the problem is the cost of the pipes. While the article is incredibly lacking in detail, it sounds like the African ISPs are paying for their own Internet connections. I hope that they are running their own email servers. The point that the article is trying to make is that nobody is peering with African ISPs, but as others have pointed out, nobody is going to do that unless the traffic is somewhat symmetric and quite significant in volume.
Basically, if you want access to my network, you pay me and you pay for the infrastructure to connect to my network.
If I want access to your network, I pay you, plus I pay for the infrastructure needed to access your network.
If we both want access to each other's networks, then perhaps we can work out a deal where no money changes hands. We'll both share the infrastructure costs.
This is a glorious socialist point of view where we the "haves" subsidize those who are the "have-nots." What's next on the agenda? I heard that Africans have to pay full price for the cars they by from the US and that keeps them under our imperialistic heel. We'd better make our car companies sell them cars for half price. Let's not forget their clothes. Lord knows the average African can't afford a decent pair of Levis. We'll have to cut them a deal on that as well.
This subsidizing of Africa would never stop if some get there way. Let not forget that When Egypt was the economic center of the Mediterranean they weren't exactly helping Europeans out of the meager life style.
Africa is in the miserable economic state it is in because of its people and politics. Those are issues they will have to solve for themselves.
"That's the sort of blinkered, philistine pig ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage."-Monty Python
I agree with other posters who say "Can someone subsidise my T1?" What this ISP operator from Kenya is saying is that he wants cheaper bandwidth. His business is doing fine and access is growing, but that isn't enough. I live in Zambia where we have about 4 ISPs (one of which is UUNet). A dialup here is about $20/month. Not bad? Can the average Zambian afford that? No. Can the average Zambian afford a computer or the education to be able to use it or the electricity to run it? No. If we make the bandwidth cheaper, will that get information to the masses? No. A dialup here is $20 a month because all bandwidth here comes from satellite uplink. That may be different in Kenya, but for many African countries it is the norm. It ain't cheap to have a bird up there bouncing the signals and a high volume of users to spread the cost we don't have. ANother reason is that African governments latch on to any enterprise that sounds remotely profitable like a pitbull. My ISP pays $40,000 a year in licensing fees to the gov and are further forced to collect something like $2/month per user in government fees. Of course the government owns the telco too (which is a competing ISP BTW) so extra dialup lines take forever to secure. I know from experience that the Kenyan telco is the same way. You want a leased line? Pay the right person and maybe it will happen this year. Why is African connectivity expensive? Like every other problem facing Africa today it is largely a result of corrupt governments leeching resources away from their people and then holding out their hand for more assistance. It is true that Africa has subsidised the development of the West, but it will take a lot more than subsidies back (in the form of cheap bandwidth or debt relief) to fix the economic damage done in the past 30-40 years since most countries have had their independence.
We're treating the African ISPs the same as we would treat the same sized ISP here in the states. You generate enough traffic, I'll peer with you and we'll split the bill. You don't generate enough traffic? Oh, well. You pay full rate for your bandwidth.
The gentleman was complaining that they're being gouged because the telecom companies are not giving them free money. The ITU decided to be nice and force all the telephone companies to give them a handout on telephone service, and this fellow thinks the ITU should require them to do so on data traffic as well.
My attitude is somewhere between 'Get off yer lazy ass and lay some cable, foo' and 'This guy is worse than the Pontiac street-people that think merely because they exists, the world, and myself by extention, owe him $5 so they can go buy crack or a bottle of Thunderbird.'
.sig: Now legally binding!
If you don't like this arrangement then consider this: If you run a web server in Australia then Telstra dings you mega bux per month. If you move it to the USA then Telstra pays a US carrier for the bandwidth required to move the content into Australia.
Since Telstra is willing to pay an American company for bandwidth required to provide content, then why isn't Telstra willing to pay an Australian company?
You know - if Telstra were to create a hospitable environment for Aussie content creators then US carriers wouldn't have the upper hand. Fix your own problems first!
Right now you can buy a 64k isdn link to tel$tra at AU$.20/megabyte. Odd thing is thats the same cost as having someone (with a decent call plan) call OZ and transfer the data. Data rates in Oz have dropped a bit over the last 3 years but are still very high. In a well connected area in the US, data is about US$2/gigbyte including the local loop (assume lots about the data flow/capcity and that stuff).
The solution to part of the problems was the Southern cross cable which was built by some Kiwi's that had the same problem Afirca has. Now that tyco (didn't they used to make toy trians or was that someone else?) is about to run a much bigger cable combined with a few dot bombs not making good on their long term data commnitments means you can get a nice 45mb link to the US for about US$33,000/mo. Connect that to a peering point and you should be able to get 20 E1's for about $5k each unlimited data(from the Aussie point of view, 95% full from the US POV)
With some of the new 100% optical repeaters, there will be the option to run undersea cables that don't need heaps of electronics hiding deep in the ocean. Lucent (or AT&T or TPC or whatever) just did a major link with repeaters every 100km. I think they were doing 5000km total span but that won't go from Hawaii to Fiji and their gear isn't the underwater type. One of the problems in Africa is that people dig up the cable to take the wire out (wire is used to provide power just like the undersea cables). Africa and Australia both have the problem of critters that seem to have a taste for cable.
Tier 1 ISPs (such as the one where I used to work) had a set of rules for peering with other ISPs. In this kind of peering, costs are split between the interested parties. If you can't meet their criteria for peering, and you still want to peer with them, you have to become a transit customer. In essence, a downstream ISP.
This criteria is usually about the kind of connection, the networks injected via BGP, etc.
Perhaps said ISPs in Africa simply don't meet this requierements. It happens in a lot of countries in different continents, not just Africa, and I know this for a fact.
No sig
I think he what he means though is that in this case, the traffic doesn't balance out. How many times do you visit sites in Africa? I don't think I ever have. How many users in Africa visit sites in the US? I would bet that is a fairly large number. That's why the costs are different.
To look at it another way. I start a small ISP with several thousand users. Will MCI pay to peer with me? No, because it is worth more for me to peer with them since they have access to all the cool sites my users want to visit. This is the same situation, just on a larger scale.
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
I can remember when Ghana went independent, it was a nice country with a productive economy and a healthy future, Kwame Nkrumah did well, apart from some indulgences like putting his picture on all the currency, but all was well, then Ankrah came along and thereon out I saw a nice country being fucked by a bunch of people who thought democracy was a form of theatre, what amazed me was their capacity to paint themselves as victims even though their opulence and exploitation, murder, intimidation make the colonials look fucking tame.
It's not easy to appoint blame, realise your own shortcomings and fix real problems in your own backyard when you can just go and blame it on someone else, amazingly this is what keeps complete despots in power, it's desperately sad. This is why I do not view money provided for education as a handout, it's the only way democracy can function, however I've seen regimes keep the money for themselves in what appears to be greed and an attempt to keep their own populace uneducated and therefore malleable, it's a way of staying in power, what is needed is for the West to say to these countries "this isn't fucking on" but then said leaders scream "colonialism" and nothing changes.
Perhaps the more open-minded /. readers might reflect on the fact that the industrialization of England and America would not have been possible without "Black ivory" (slaves) from Africa who for centuries provided the basic source of wealth of the plantation econonmy which in turn subsidized the industrial revolution? Or that the huge profits from the mineral wealth & exploited labor of the Congo under the Belgians (and after the CIA killed Lumumba, under the "independent" rule of the puppet Mengistu) served to massively increase the wealth of the developed world, and still play a key role in providing the raw materials for the high-tech "revolution" (see: for a NY Times piece on this).
When the colonialists were finally forced out, them made sure that the new elites would keep the profits flowing (with a nice commission for themselves, of course), and if the people demand niceties like democracy or an end to corruption, there will always be the military to straighten things out.
Am I oversimplifying? Sure, but so are many of the posts I see here, like the racist one I saw here comparing African nations to homeless people panhandling for crack money.
Ever wonder why so many people in Nigeria, say, regard Osama bin Laden as a hero? You can't rob, colonize and oppress people for centuries and insist it's a level playing field, folks. Read some history, get a sense of why Africa is so messed up, and how *your* lifestyle is related to all this.
Here in America, companies/corporations pay for telco...every month(year/decade/whatever)...without regard to who sent who what. (If this isn't how it works, then let me know; my company keeps getting charged every month for telco)
Africa pays money for it's lines? What a shame. Africa should get it for free, no? Or at a reduced rate, no? After all, Africa provides so many things to the world for free, right?
Sorry, bud, but Africa gets no sympathy here. They have a lot of opportunity there and they keep wasting it. (And don't talk to me about being "under a bootheel" either; the British tried that shit here in America 2 centuries ago, too, if you recall) Before Africa gets the luxury of the net how about it gets the rest of its infrastructure in place first?
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
High tariffs. Most third-world countries charge extremely high import duties on automobiles and other manufactured goods to generate funds for the government and to protect local industry, such as it is.
Also, many (if not most) African governments are extremely corrupt. Any aid developed countries send sits in warehouses or is stolen by "leaders".
Tips and Tricks for Mozilla
No, the US did not invent packet switched networks. That was done in the UK's JANET network in the late '60's. What became the Internet was a wide variety of national packet-switching systems using different protocols. The US protocols were adopted more because of numbers of users than any superior technical merit.
And what about the most common (by far) use of the Internet, the World Wide Web? Invented by a Briton working at Europe's CERN research centre.
Anyway, it's not a long-term problem. Internet usage in Asia and Europe in particular will shortly be at US levels, and local traffic will overtake the current US-centred 'Net, particularly as European identity grows. For the record, Slashdot and Google are the *only* US-based web site that I use extensivly; most of the others are here in Australia or in Europe.
PS: try learning other languages; it's fun and opens up all sorts of new sources of information. It's nice to be able to type a technical query into Google and be able to understand German, Italian or French information without Babelfish's dodgy translations. I know you're American and hence hard-wired for English-only, but do give it a try!
Your heart is in the right place, but you're still being a little thick here.
.de, Germany pays for your visit, everytime you go look at the BBC, England pays for your visit. Even if you don't do it that often, that doesn't matter to the rest of the world, in fact due to the fact that they pay for it I'm sure they're quite glad that you don't.
What the citizens of the rest of the world would like is on the extremely rare occasions that one a US resident does venture outside their sheep paddock, they do not ask us to pay their virtual airfare, understand?
Everytime you go to
It's simple fair play, we pay you for the content on your networks, so you should pay us, not a single figure just because we *have* a network, but volume based, the same way US telco's charge the rest of the world.
Am I being clear? Do all you Americans understand yet?
Regards