Peering at the Internet’s Frontier: A First Look at ISP Interconnectivity in Africa

In developing regions, the performance to commonly visited destinations is dominated by the network latency, which in turn depends on the connectivity from ISPs in these regions to the locations that host popular sites and content. We take a first look at ISP interconnectivity between various regions in Africa and discover many circuitous Internet paths that should remain local often detour through Europe. We investigate the causes of circuitous Internet paths and evaluate the benefits of increased peering and better cache proxy placement for reducing latency to popular Internet sites.