You don’t hear much about the state of the internet in Africa, so we here at Uptrends decided to find out how Africa’s internet is doing. We looked at data traffic and internet penetration (how many in the population have internet access), and came up with some very interesting numbers.

Bandwidth (traffic)

Internet exchange points (IXPs) are locations where internet service providers (ISPs) interconnect so that they can send traffic directly to each other instead of having this traffic routed via other providers (and potentially very long distances), cutting traffic costs and increasing performance in the process.

The IXP throughput can give us a good idea of how much internet traffic is being handled in Africa.

IXP traffic in Africa

Country	Name	City	Peering ISPs	Started	Traffic
Tanzania	AIXP	Arusha	14	2007	200 Kbps
Angola	ANG-IXP		5	2006	Unknown
Botswana	BINX	Gabarone	8	2005	Unknown
Egypt	CRIX	Cairo	3	2005	12 Mbps
South Africa	GINX	Grahamstown	6	2005	3 Mbps
Ghana	GIX	Accra	24	2005	Unknown
Nigeria	IBIX	Ibadan	2	2003	200 Kbps
South Africa	JINX	Johannesburg	24	1996	450 Mbps
Congo-Kinshasa	KINIX	Kinshasa	12	2002	1 Mbps
Kenya	KIXP	Nairobi	23	2002	14 Mbps
Mauritius	MIXP	Port Louis	4	2005	Unknown
Mozambique	MozIX	Maputo	11	2002	5 Mbps
Nigeria	NIXP	Lagos	15	2007	Unknown
Rwanda	RINEX	Kigali	2	2004	400 Kbps
Swaziland	SZIX	Mbabane	3	2004	128 Kbps
Tanzania	TIX	Dar es Salaam	14	2003	2 Mbps
Uganda	UIXP	Kampala	9	2003	2.3 Mbps

 

As you can see, the IXPs in Africa count their throughput in megabit per second, and sometimes even kilobit per second. The rest of the world tends to be concerned with gigabit per second.

To put the above numbers in perspective, here are the traffic numbers for some large IXPs outside Africa. We will let the data speak for itself here:

IXP traffic for five IXPs outside Africa

Country	Name	City	Peering ISPs	Started	Traffic
Netherlands	AMS-IX	Amsterdam	287	1997	413 Gbps
Germany	DE-CIX	Frankfurt	229	1995	380 Gbps
United Kingdom	LINX	London	221	1994	207 Gbps
Japan	JPNAP	Tokyo	88	2001	183 Gbps
Sweden	Netnod	Stockholm	53	1997	103 Gbps

 

Internet penetration

The average internet penetration among the population in Africa is 4.7%. The world total is 20% (Europe and North America have 43.4% and 71.1% respectively). But even if the internet penetration is much lower in Africa compared to the rest of the world, it is nowhere near the order of magnitude that is being indicated by the IXP traffic.

Even though 4.7% may sound like a really small number, it is the equivalent of over 44 million people with internet access.

Broadband penetration, however, is much lower at a mere 0.1%. There were only 1,097,200 broadband subscribers in the whole of Africa as of September 2007. Most likely broadband connections are restricted mostly to major companies, schools and authorities.

Conclusion

Take a close look at the numbers in this post, because they really show how far behind Africa is on the internet. Hopefully significant progress will be made since the internet has become a vital part of the global economy. Africa will fall behind even more in the long run if they are not able to participate on the internet to the extent and capacity of the rest of the world.