Mauritius will host the 10th-anniversary edition of the Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) organised by the Internet Society and African IXP Association (AFIX) in collaboration with Rogers Capital
The event will take place on 20-22 August at the Intercontinental Hotel, Balaclava.
AfPIF 2019 will connect and bring together major infrastructure, service and content providers with policymakers to identify and discuss ways to improve network interconnection, lower connectivity costs, and increase local content for the benefit of Internet users across the region.
AfPIF is an annual event that serves as a platform to develop the African Internet and was created to address the fact that most of Africa’s local Internet traffic is exchanged outside the continent. At the same time, Africa imported over 99 per cent of the Internet traffic consumed, which created an “Internet Transit Deficit”. Exchanging traffic locally through Internet Exchange Points (IXP) reduces the cost of Internet access and network delays and increases the speed of content access.
Dawit Bekele, Africa regional bureau director for the Internet Society, said, “AfPIF has contributed considerably in changing the interconnection environment in Africa over the last 10 years. Locally traffic exchanged traffic has increased from less than one GB to close to 800 GB.”
More than 250 participants from across the African continent are expected to attend the event, with leading technology providers Liquid Telecom, Seacom and Huawei as Platinum sponsors and AFRINIC, Emtel Business, Linx, Microsoft and Rogers Capital as gold sponsors.
Kyle Spencer, co-coordinator of the African IXP Association, added, “Our target is to localise 80 per cent of Africa’s Internet traffic by 2020, and I believe we’re well on our way.”
“Packet Clearing House reports that Africa currently sees the highest growth of domestic bandwidth production in the world, registering a 92 per cent increase from 410 Gbps to 786 Gbps within the last 12 months – and our internal industry benchmarking data corroborates this. It’s an exciting time for Africa, and we look forward to building on this momentum in Mauritius,” he concluded.
