[saalweachter]

Spitballing, what is internet connectivity like between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa?

If the point of putting a datacenter in Africa is to serve users in Africa better, North Africa may already get pretty good connectivity from European datacenters, so putting the datacenter on the other end may help more overall?

[jhugo]

Yep. I work on latency-sensitive stuff (realtime A/V infra) and our customers have users throughout Africa. North Africa is pretty well connected to Europe, and the Horn of Africa is well connected to the Gulf region and to Mumbai. Southern Africa is the obvious location for a first datacentre, and South Africa is probably the only decent choice in southern Africa.

[jhonof]

Wouldn't Botswana be as good if not better? It has significantly lower corruption issues, and higher GDP per capita and HDI when compared to SA. It also is an incredibly fast growing economy and it has lower crime. Does Botswana just currently not have the talent or infrastructure?

[jhugo]

I think a significant factor, apart from generally worse infra and a smaller talent pool, would be the lack of a coastline. Basically all the long-distance capacity in Africa is in the form of submarine cables going around the coast. A landlocked country means you have to rely on terrestrial systems through at least one third country, introducing a whole range of new costs and risks, and probably makes it hard to get the desired level of control/ownership for the inter-region connectivity (cloud providers are often investing in submarine cable systems directly now).

[MonkeyClub]

> and South Africa is probably the only decent choice in southern Africa.

It’s not racism, it’s just cost-benefit analysis, am I reading it correctly?

[bombcar]

Someone like Google should have very good information on where their current customers (and their customers) are, and that alone could be decisive.

If many of the customers in Africa are already well served by Europe (think Egypt) or the Middle East, and of the remainder a large percentage is in South Africa itself, then South Africa makes a good choice for the first.

After all, starting in SA doesn't prevent them opening further datacenter in other countries as they grow.

[MonkeyClub]

I see downvotes, so I guess people missed the absent /s. Knee jerks much?

But yeah, the question is honest, and would appreciate an answer.

[jhugo]

I didn't downvote, but honestly just don't understand your comment. I thought it was obvious but maybe I shouldn't have left it unsaid: South Africa has significantly better infrastructure than any other country in southern Africa. We're not talking a small difference. If you want to open a cloud region in southern Africa, I don't think you have any other choices.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Spitballing, what is internet connectivity like between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa?

Almost entirely via undersea cables. Cape Town, on the coast at the SW corner of Africa, is actually one of the closest places in Southern Africa to Europe and US, measuring by ping time.

North Africa is already "close enough" to data centres in Europe and/or Middle-east.

[yardstick]

Yeah that’s a good point. Most of the connectivity is via cables running around the coast. So somewhere like Nigeria could also make sense.