INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
ICT infrastructure a barrier to
data centre adoption in Africa
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T
o help Africa realise the benefits of
the data economy, more data centres
in the region are urgently needed.
However, building data centres starts with
enabling access to the ICT infrastructure and
ecosystems, and there are several barriers
Africa faces.
“All of the big trends that are shaping
economies today, from cloud data centres,
smart cities, the Internet of Things and more,
need high bandwidth availability, security,
low latency and strict synchronisation,”
said Stephane Duproz, CEO of Africa Data
Centres. “Internet speeds in Africa are very
poor compared to the rest of the world
and without faster, more affordable, more
available data, ICT development is stunted.
Africa’s data journey has been a long time
coming. The continent currently has the
lowest number of Internet connections,
with just over 20% of the continent having
access. However, with that said, it also has
the largest potential for progress. It’s not all
doom and gloom though. There has been
progress over the last few years. The African
Union, with support from the World Bank
Group, has set the goal of connecting every
individual, business and government on the
continent by 2030.”
The East African Cable System (EASSy),
a 10,000-km undersea fibre-optic cable
system that runs from South Africa to
Sudan, has expanded Internet access for
20 coastal and landlocked African countries
and has lowered the cost of broadband
costs by as much as 90%.
“Across the continent, operators have also
extensively invested in increasing capacity
through investing in terrestrial fibre
networks. Mobile LTE networks provision
is growing too, but remains in-adequate,
not reaching remote and rural areas,”
said Duproz. “The next step to expanding
broadband on the continent is to bring
Internet connections inland through
fibre-optic networks. However, this is a very
costly exercise.”
Local content is another major constraint to
connectivity on the continent, says Duproz.
The majority of content is hosted outside the
continent and lack of service infrastructure
in the region means that web users have to
fetch content that is coming from the other
side of the globe.
“More often than not, local content providers
want to host their content abroad to reduce
costs, but this content needs to be delivered
back to the country over international
Internet transit links that, in despite
significant infrastructure investments in the
last few years, are still costly,” said Duproz.
“In fact, international connectivity can often
represent a significant portion (up to half) of
the price of fixed broadband.”
Duproz believes that one way we can help
meet this challenge is by increasing 4G
coverage and terrestrial fibre networks as
widely as possible.
“This connectivity will facilitate the physical
migration of enterprise IT to data centres
to provide faster and cheaper access to the
ICT ecosystem for African businesses and
consumers,” he said. n
Stephane Duproz, CEO of Africa
Data Centres
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