The growth of internet penetration and increasing speeds is encouraging content consumption through smartphones and laptops, however, the hosting location of foreign content still costs the users a lot of money in terms of international connection fees.

Telecommunication Service Providers Association of Kenya (TESPOK) is currently engaging with Akamai, one of the largest global content delivery system accounting for at least 30% of global web traffic at the Kenya Internet Exchange Point (KIXP).

In October last year, Akamai announced that it will be peered at the KIXP.

Speaking at the East Africa Com in Nairobi, Kenya Fiona Asonga the CEO of TESPOK said, “Local caches give the end user a much more enjoyable experience in terms of accessing the content because everything is local.”

This means that requests to servers are dealt with within the country making it faster to access content as opposed to requests being routed to servers in other continents.

She added that, “The truth is that all of our local networks are very stable. When the content is available locally it is also cheaper for the service providers to access the content.”

Cache hosts content within a region not only make it faster to connect and download content but also make it cheaper for users in the long run in terms of connection fees.

TESPOK, which already manages the KIXP, also hosts the Google Cache in Mombasa. This has made YouTube streaming much faster on devices in Kenya.

According to a latest research by the Internet Society, local hosting could help Africa save millions of dollars in respect to accessing content.

“Almost all of the commercial websites in Rwanda are hosted abroad. A small savings for the content providers in hosting it abroad results in significantly higher costs for the ISPs to access the content,” the report said.

“For one of the larger Rwandan websites that was examined, the content developer saved $111 per year by hosting overseas, while it cost the Rwandan ISPs approximately $13,500 in transit costs to deliver the content from abroad to local users. This impact is limited, however, because the websites hosted abroad suffer from high latency, which reduces usage.”

Local companies such as Angani are now offering hosting and cloud services within Kenya to help companies achieve desired loading speeds for their web presence.