State of African internetworking [pdf]

Understanding African ISP network topology is only possible with a thorough knowledge of where the OSI layer 1 is: specifically, where the submarine cables are, and where they are not. The cables that reached Accra, Ghana in the past ten years for transport capacity to London are a good example. And the more recent cables that connect Sierra Leone, Liberia ,etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EASSy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT-3/WASC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEAMS_%28cable_system%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SACS_%28cable_system%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEACOM_%28African_cable_system...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_One

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_%28cable_system%29

There is still a great deal of network traffic that takes a round-trip to Europe before reaching another African nation. As an example: If you look at the BGP adjacencies and IP space, all of the ISPs in Freetown, Sierra Leone are logically the same as if they were in a suburb of London.

Things are also heavily imbalanced in terms of the influence that .ZA wields. Something like 80% of the AFNIC IP space that is issued annually (in terms of cumulative number of newly issued ipv4 /24s) goes to .CO.ZA ISPs.

Unsurprisingly, there is far less infrastructure than in developed countries and you generally end up paying more for inferior serivice. If, say, you're interested in setting up a startup, you are best off in metropolitan areas. With the majority of the continent population still scattered, you have to be wary that the being expensive or simply unavailable is still a major barrier for many potential users (hence initiatives like Google Loon and Internet.org - you can't grow your Internet startup if your users have no Internet)

If you target mobile and your app/site can work on slow connections then the market is huge. For example South Africa has about 20 million users(out of 50 million) with some internet access but only about 5-10 million has broadband.

South Africa and Kenya has good and fast internet in the cities and large towns.

Don't expect to use AWS or Azure because none of the mayor cloud providers has a DC in Africa. So hosting local is advisable otherwise you incur latency of at best 180ms.

Haha, I still remember Winston the pigeon racing to deliver his 4GB of data...

For anyone interested: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm