From Africa to Africa: AS-level topology snapshot

Abstract

Over the last years, an extensive amount of initiatives has been taken by African telecom actors to increase the number of high capacity backbones, and interconnection infrastructures such as Internet eXchange Points. The goal of this work is to shed light on the state of inter-domain routing in the continent, and monitor its evolution. For this purpose, we deployed 18 RIPE Atlas probes in 11 countries, targeting ISPs where no probes were present. We performed active measurements among a total 116 similar probes hosted in 63 ISPs, covering 28 countries. The measurement campaign lasted 4 months. We provide the first snapshot of the Intra-African Internet connectivity, and highlight its characteristics. Our results show a large proportion of long paths, in terms of number of intermediate ISPs and Round Trip Times, even for pairs of ASes located in the same region, or even country. Approximately 80% of the paths between our monitored AS pairs were found to be served via other continents. We finally discuss transit habits of the studied ASes, based on their business profile, the official language of the country where they operate, and the location of the country they are based in. We highlight the benefits of local peering on the perceived quality of service. We hope to observe, in our further works, the success of projects aiming at fostering IXPs establishment in the studied area, essentials to attract CDNs, improve quality of service for local users, and reduce the transit costs of local operators.