Re: Mauritius Internet Exchange Point Adventures

From: S Moonesamy <sm+mu_at_elandsys.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2015 13:52:26 -0700

Hi Logan,
At 13:15 22-10-2015, Loganaden Velvindron wrote:
>I deliberately kept it as simple as possible. I'm not sure that a
>non technical reader would understand ping.

I'll keep my comments as non-technical as possible.

>Why can't we achieve the same kind of latency for traffic across
>local ISPs in Mauritius ?

The two main ISPs in Mauritius are Orange Mauritius and Emtel. Those
ISPs do not have any incentive to exchange traffic or reduce latency
as their customers do not see that as a problem. The other companies
with ISP licenses are focused on selling value-added services instead
of operating as an ISP. In non-technical terms, competition in the
(local) internet market is virtually non-existent.

>My guess is the high price of setting up a server in Mauritius,
>compared to Europe and US, where it's so much cheaper. I think that
>we need more web sites and services in Mauritius.

I don't think that the high price of setting a server in Mauritius is
the major factor. There isn't much value in doing local stuff. For
example, SEO in Mauritius is worthless.

>Also, as people complain about high latency for facebook
>(400-1200ms), I believe the problem is the lack of facebook servers
>in Mauritius and/or Cache servers for facebook. I definitely think
>that services like facebook should have had less 100 ms latency from
>Mauritius, instead of 400-1200ms.

There is a cache server in Mauritius for some Facebook stuff. My
guess is that the latency to Facebook could be around 74 ms [1].

You ignored the following question: why is AfriNIC managing the local
internet exchange point?

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

1. There is some overhead which I am not taking into consideration.
Received on Thu Oct 22 2015 - 20:53:10 PST