Forwarded from Conrad on the KIDMM list, with bcs-devel implications... i wonder how we pull all this sort of thing together in preparation for the earth summit, and what is to be done?




-----Original Message-----
From: BCS Knowledge, Information and Metadata Management [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Conrad Taylor
Sent: 20 August 2010 09:32
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [KIDMM] IXian artefacts in Mombasa

On BBC World Service radio this morning, on "Business Daily" there was a
news and interview item about the establishment of an Internet Exchance
Point (IXP) in Mombasa, Kenya. In this item, the person being interviewed by
the station, Karen Rose of The Internet Society, gave a pretty clear
explanation of what an Internet Exchange Point is, what it does, how it does
it, and why this new one is good for development in Kenya.

This now allows me for the first time to clearly understand the function of
LINX, the London Internet Exchange which is situated in London Docklands!

Karen referred to the news earlier in the year, hailed by many as a great
development for East Africa, when the SeaNet cable came achore, greatly
increasing the bandwidth available to the country nd its neighbours. But,
she said, in a country like Kenya, a lot of the external-facing bandwidth is
needlessly consumed, and the owners of the upstream access services
needlessly enriched at the expense of Kenya -- if someone who is a customer
of one Kenyan ISP accesses a Web site of a Kenyan company hosted at another
local ISP, and yet all the traffic has to flow overseas and through a switch
in London, say, before coming back home again.

By agreeing to set up and use a local Internet Exchange Point, a group of
local ISPs can arrange so that purely local traffic is routed through the
exchange instead. The advantages which Karen cited were:

(a) local people have faster access to local resources (reduced "latency")

(b) having a local IXP increases the robustness of the local Internet
system, and Karen cited a failure of the SeaNet link earlier this year

(c) the costs to local ISPs for purely local traffic is hugely reduced by
removing the dependency on upstream services, which in a place like Kenya
arrive through pinch-points and are monopolistic and expensive; Karen
suggested savings in the order of 1:50.

It's interesting what might constitute monopoly in this situation. One of
the issues which came up a lot at the WSIS summit was that many developing
countries with poor tax-raising infrastructures make up for this by taxing
use of local communications very heavily, either with levies on service
providers or by means of a telecoms monopoly. It imposes a great
disadvantage on local businesses vis-à-vis their competitors abroad, and can
be said to stifle other forms of social development by pricing the Internet
so highly.

And when I did a bit of reading about Internet Exchanges on Wikipedia, I see
that there already is another IXP in Kenya, founded in 2000. The Kenya
government tried to crush it because they wanted all Internet traffic to
flow through the Kenyan government telecoms monopoly Jambonet, but this was
overthrown in the courts, I think in 2002.

This second IXP for Mombasa has been set up with international assistance, I
take it of a technical nature, from The Internet Society.

Conrad

PS: Subject line explanation!

In Frank Herbert's "Dune" epic series of sci-fi novels, many of the more
advanced and mysterious technologies such as invisible spacecraft
("no-ships") and interrogation probes are said to have been manufactured by
the planetary society of the Ixian Federation, Ix presumably being, though
not stated, the ninth planet of its system.

This email has been scanned for all viruses by the MessageLabs Email
Security System.

This email has been scanned for all viruses by the MessageLabs Email
Security System.