The document discusses barriers to content production and distribution in Africa. It describes how using a content delivery network like Akamai can help by deploying local caching servers. This leads to improved performance, with users seeing increased throughput and some seeing speeds over 20 Mbps. As performance improves, usage of the cached content doubles within three months. However, transit costs in Africa are high, so using an Internet exchange point for caching requires a transit "sponsor" to make it economically viable and pass the savings and performance benefits to participants.

1. Barriers to content production &
distribution in Africa
AFPIF 2015 - Mozambique
Christian Kaufmann - Akamai Technologies

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Highly distributed, deeply deployed on-demand computing
platform that serves any kind of web traffic and applications
The Akamai Intelligent Platform
Typical daily traffic:
• More than 2 trillion requests served
• Delivering over 33 Terabits/second
• 15-30% of all daily web traffic
The Akamai Intelligent Platform:
200,000+
Servers
2,000+
Locations
130+
Countries
1,300+
Networks
1100+
Cities

3. ©2012 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
ON-NET, IX or Transit?
Transit
Eyeball Network
Origin Server
IX
Content
CDN Servers

4. ©2012 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Performance change after deploying a local cache
Before: 90% below 500 kpbs throughput
After: 50% of users increased throughput above 500 kbps and 5% in
excess of 20 Mbps

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Traffic increase after deploying a local cache
As performance improved, usage doubled within three months

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Various flavors of transit…
- If you do not have a on-net cluster or peering with us,
you get served via transit
- If you have an on-net cluster we have to fill the cache, this is
aprox. 20% or less of your regular transit requirements for
Akamai traffic.
- If we deploy at an IX
- We need transit to fill the cache
- Transit in Africa is quite expensive so it does often not make sense
economically
- We need a transit “sponsor” to enable the cost savings and the performance
improvements for all IX members
-> This is a win – win situation for all participants!!!

7. ©2012 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Questions?
Email: ck@akamai.com