Re: Seeking VPS providers for low volume network probe

[Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom mu>]

On Thursday, October 30, 2014 12:41:55 AM Jim Popovitch 
wrote:

> As for Africa... I use the RamNode Netherlands to provide
> coverage to Africa.  I spent the past year and half
> trolling the African VPS marketplace, and while there
> are excellent providers, the peering SUCKS.  I'm not
> going to get into why the peering sucks... let's just
> say that one or two strategic providers seem to like for
> everything to route through London.   Anyhoo... In South
> Africa you can get solid VPS'es from domains.co.za, and
> vps.co.za.  Their network peerings will also allow you
> to adequately cover 75% of Nambia, Botswana,  Zambia,
> Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique.   On the
> Eastern side of the continent there is kilihost.com
> (formerly aptus.co.tz), however they are still working
> with TIX and KIXP (and have been for years) to establish
> better regional peering (the whole of East Africa seems
> to route 95% of traffic through London... someone on
> this list provides that transit.... hopefully at
> cost....).

For eastern and southern Africa, there are reasonable 
peering locations that could help fix these problems.

But the issue is not that a handful of providers prefer to 
route everything through London, but that the majority of 
service providers and mobile networks in Africa prefer to 
buy capacity into Europe, than from local service providers 
selling IP in Africa.

The reasons for this are legacy. While those reasons are 
falling away and we are seeing more and more uptake for 
service in-continent, it's not coming fast enough.

Mark.

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