Internet policymakers have been urged to identify ways of facilitating local markets for content hosting, access and distribution.

While making a presentation at a panel discussion at the Africa Internet Summit 2018, Dr Josiah Chavula through a study on Latency and content hosting revealed how bulk of Africa’s content news was hosted outside the continent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Josiah Chavula presenting during a panel discussion on Latency,throughput and content hosting at AIS’18 in Dakar Senegal

The discussions showed how in some cases, it is faster to reach European or North American networks than those in other regions of Africa, indicating most African countries heavily rely on foreign services, both to host, to access, and to distribute local content.

The discussions focused on the different factors affecting the performance of the Internet across the continent, including throughput, latency, and content hosting.

The study, which was jointly conducted by Dr Josiah Chavula, Dr Enrico Calandro, Sarah Kinden both from Research ICT Africa and Martin Levy from Cloudflare revealed the presence of latency clusters, where some countries have built up low delay interconnectivity among themselves.

Among the recommendations from the study included incentivising investments on data centres and local exchange points to stimulate economies of scale for the local web hosting market.

The panel was composed of Dr Enrico Calandro, Dr Josiah Chavula, Sarah Kinden, Martin Levy and Michuki Mwangi from ISOC.