I linked to it in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300309
The backbone cables loop around the coast of Africa. Cape Town is on that coast. So is Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria, the most populous country. But the most populous area and economic hub of South Africa is around Johannesburg, which is far from the coast.
We assume that AWS took the decision that the South African economy today was more important than the Nigerian economy; this data centre won't be much closer to Nigeria than European data centres are. Or maybe the double distance, double lag time at South Africa is a bigger reduction to eliminate.
This press release https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2018/10/an-aws-region-i... says "The new AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will ... provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa" We can assume that this statement is truer the further south of the Sahara you go ;)
I believe you that this is the case, but the map you linked is a submarine cable map. If there were backbone ables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up.
Good point. I haven't found a lot of resource on this topic. The exception, which discusses the growth of terrestrial networks is this:
http://www.africabandwidthmaps.com/?p=5505 e.g.
> Of the total activated/ sold bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 3.065 Tbps (92.3%) was supplied directly by submarine cable.
> Of the total bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 248 Gbps (7.5%) was supplied by terrestrial cross-border networks connected to submarine cables. The completion of new cross-border links, and the expansion of capacity on others, has seen the volume of intra-regional traffic backhauled to submarine cable landing points increase by 65% in the last year
I note also this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301912
> I believe at present most traffic between Nigeria and South Africa transits London
Simply, the network is at present not optimised for traffic between e.g. Johannesburg and Lagos. Why would it be? There's not a lot of it. An internet user in Johannesburg is mostly either going to look at domestic websites in SA, or the "top 1000" sites, hosted in EU and USA.
I hope that this will change over time, and better data centres in Africa is part of that.
If internet traffic is anything like road traffic then the presence of a highway would generate more traffic. Having a crappy connection pretty much guarantees that there is little traffic!
In reality everything goes via the submarine cables though. It's easier than fighting through the landrights of 6,000 miles of sometimes shaky countries.
There are, and the information in sibling comments is either wrong or outdated. Liquid has a fiber network that literally stretches from "Cape to Cairo"[1]. Liquid has a presence in Nigeria, but it's not connected to the overland fiber network
> covering Africa's fastest-growing economies, where no fixed network has ever existed before.
It probably doesn't help developers in Nigeria get lower latency or cheaper access to AWS, but it may help them get more customers more quickly, as some other obvious markets that might be a better fit for services they develop would benefit from the region in South Africa.
However, it is quite expensive to operate data centres in Nigeria (as the electrical supply is not very reliable; I know that at least quite recently many DCs there need to run on generator about 10% of the time, I don't know if that has changed since).
There are, however, some initiatives to get more international intra-continental peering going (e.g. I believe at present most traffic between Nigeria and South Africa transits London).
Electrical supply in Cape Town has had issues too: https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding
I expect that data centers will use a lot of power in summer when the temperature outside gets around 40 C (over 100 F)
> Electrical supply in Cape Town has had issues too: https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding
Oh wow, one day of residential load shedding in the past year.
Nigeria had a country-wide electrical outage this year: https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/254308-updated...
A few years ago, I was somewhat involved with some data centres in Nigeria, which ran on generators 2-3 times a day for at last an hour each time, every day, for more than a year, due to the electrical grid in the city (Lagos) going down. The locals indicated that this was normal (e.g. had been like this for years).
Ghana has much more reliable electricity than Nigeria.
A few more articles:
http://dailypost.ng/2018/07/24/nigeria-may-not-stable-power-...
https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-challenge-keepi...
"To cope with the frequent blackouts and lack of access, a quarter of Nigerians relied on generators in 2016"
South Africa's electricity generation (Eskom) has problems, but nothing like Nigeria's (yet).