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

They should do the same thing with China...

[BlueUnderwear]

... with all the spam that we get from there.

Can somebody help pay for my T1?

[Tony Shepps]

I have a T1 for my business. I have to pay 100% of the bill for it. Sometimes my clients and I get email from AOL users. AOL doesn't pay for one cent of my T1, yet they expect to send me messages without worrying about the cost! This is annoying. Please, can someone tell me how I can get others to pay for my T1? Thanks.

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.

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.

The same happens here in South America

[carlosm]

I work as network admin, i'm the technical POC in ARIN for our netblocks and i can tell you that the same happens here in South America (Uruguay) with our big-carrier providers (CW and UUNet nowadays)

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 :-)

And the point is?

[jht]

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.

Let's see....

[nochops]

In less than one year, I've received 19 emails from various Nigerian government officials, as well as several from the Republic Republic of Congo, each promising me at least $30 million if I store some money for them.

That comes to $17,100,000,000, more than enough to pay the paltry $500 million bandwidth bill.

Mebbe you should read the article

[technos]

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.'

Re:How Did Oz Change Rates?

[newt]

The original poster is mistaken: No split happened, and Australia still pays the full cost of connectivity to the rest of the world.

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