Extra Cables, Extra Redundancy, and Higher Efficiency in Africa and the Center East

Final month, I had the pleasure of talking at Cairo ICT about colocation and connectivity traits.

I coated international bandwidth first, adopted by a rundown on bandwidth within the Center East and Africa.

Subsequent up, information facilities and interconnection hubs, with a dialogue on the place the hubs are, what makes a hub, and the way hubs develop. Lastly, I talked about end-user demand, which is essential with the expansion of web and demand.

You possibly can catch a video of this presentation and obtain my slides beneath.

[Transcription starts at 04:43]

If we watch submarine cables, we type of have an thought the place hyperscalers need to go, or transfer, or construct their submarine cables, or their consortium cables to attach these information facilities.

So within the subsequent three years, we’re seeing $11 billion of funding. It is an enormous, large quantity of development. It takes going again to the early 2000s earlier than we see development like this. So that is all introduced funding.

Why will we see this? As a result of globally, we’re seeing demand, and we’re speaking about capability rising at 20-30% a 12 months.

So, to fulfill the demand, industrial components like decreasing unit prices. An important side for hyperscalers is to boost route variety as a result of, as we noticed with what occurred in Africa, Center East at first of the 12 months—the cable cuts within the Pink Sea and off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire—we noticed loads of issues with connectivity.

So despite the fact that there are three or 4 cables per aspect—long-haul cables—that go all the way in which down, the hyperscalers see this, they usually say, “oh, we want extra connectivity, extra resiliency.” So we’ll be seeing much more cables coming in.

Additionally, loads of the cables are getting older out, totally on the Africa aspect. A whole lot of the cables got here in round 2010, about 2008, 2012. These cables are beginning to become older, economically nearly finish of life, so it is getting nearer.

That is only a map—as a result of TeleGeography is maps—that exhibits the newest cable techniques in pink, the deliberate cables in grey, after which all of the blue dots are principally what number of landings per location. When you look carefully, the place do you see a ton of landings over the following few years?

A whole lot of it across the peninsula within the Center East and the northeast aspect of Africa, in fact, together with Egypt. And that is why we’re right here.

This picture exhibits the place all of the deliberate information facilities, hyperscaler cloud information facilities have been introduced to be constructed. And should you look as soon as once more it’s very dense across the peninsula, Arabian Peninsula, and in Africa.

Now, a few issues which might be necessary after we’re speaking concerning the development and the connectivity is pricing.

That is the weighted median of 100 GigE IP transit, principally shopping for web, on the earth. Principally, inexperienced is a really low value globally and pink is a really excessive value. So we see three areas left with very excessive costs for connectivity, or IP transit, within the Center East space, India, and Australia.

After which if we take a look at this, it is exhibiting the speed of decline. We see the pink is a sluggish fee of decline and the inexperienced is a quick fee of decline.

India is declining a bit sooner. South Africa has been declining in a short time just lately, however the Center East and a few elements of East Asia are holding. After which within the U.S. and Western Europe there hasn’t been a lot of a drop as a result of costs are already so low. Preserve that in thoughts as we go ahead.

Need a copy of Patrick’s slides?
Obtain his full presentation over right here.