By Prince Osuagwu
The Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, IXPN, has urged companies to collaborate with indigenous cloud-neutral data centres by hosting data locally, saying lack of cooperation in the industry has led to duplication of infrastructure and ultimately, high cost of services for the end-users.
At an exclusive peering workshop, organized by IXPN and Africa Data Centres (ADC) in collaboration with Workonline Communications, Chief Executive Officer of IXPN, Mr. Muhammed Rudman said there is a lack of collaboration between the various operators in the ecosystem, which has led to duplication of infrastructure and ultimately, high cost of services for the end-users.
IXPN, provides a platform where networks interconnect directly within Nigeria.
According to Muhammed, “there is a lot of fragmentation in the industry. Despite the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC’s framework for infrastructure sharing, industry players do not collaborate; that is why we have duplication of infrastructure which is supposed to be shared.”
He noted that if industry players collaborate, it will bring down operational costs and capital expenditure.
Speaking on what peering in a carrier and cloud-neutral data centres will bring to the industry and the Nigerian economy in general, Muhammed said peering between Internet Exchange Point and a carrier/cloud-neutral data centres will enhance connections for citizens and organisations alike, and help the economy to thrive.
He said: “Peering through internet exchanges addresses the challenges of traffic by ensuring the shortest possible route is used to reach a given destination. It keeps traffic as local as possible, which improves performance and enables faster connections between networks, facilitating high-speed data transfer, lower latency, increased bandwidth and improved fault tolerance.
“Local hosting of content is a driver for economic growth. Money paid to foreign hosting companies constitutes capital flight, puts more strain on Nigeria’s foreign earnings and slows the growth of local data centers and delays the development of new ones. But, hosting locally provides additional revenue opportunities to local ISPs and data centers which in turn creates more job and technical competencies. Besides, local content hosted abroad has higher latency than if hosted locally” he added.
Source: Vanguard