A lack of internet exchanges and data centres in Africa could prevent its inhabitants from experiencing faster web browsing and software application speeds, despite a number of high-speed undersea and terrestrial broadband cables having been connected to the continent.

This is according to Christo Briedenhann, SA country manager of IT services company Riverbed, who says that businesses in Africa run the risk of focusing more on bandwidth rather than the equally key issue of latency.

Latency is the amount of time it takes for an internet packet to travel from source to destination. Both latency and bandwidth determine the speed and capacity of a network. And nearby internet exchanges, in particular, help shorten the distance these packets need to travel to a server that hosts a web page or a software application.

Africa’s problem is that despite having more bandwidth thanks to undersea cables such as SEACOM and Eassy, a lack of internet exchanges and even data centres on the continent to host content could result in slower browsing and application speeds as compared to the West and Asia: regions that already have all this infrastructure in place.

“There’s a point where bandwidth won’t help you,” says Briedenhann.

“An example is you can increase a highway between Johannesburg and Cape Town as big as you want...but you’ve got a speed limit of which you’re not allowed to go faster than 120 kilometres per hour.

“Many companies don’t realise this,” Briedenhann adds.

Mervin Miemoukanda, an ICT research analyst for Frost & Sullivan in South Africa, agrees with Briedenhann’s claims that latency is an issue in Africa.

“Many African countries have on average two cables landing onto their shores, but they are still witnessing high latency due to a lack of telecoms infrastructure,” says Miemoukanda.

“New cables should be complemented by an internet infrastructure and also by internet exchanges. If you don’t have such things, you are going to experience a lot of latency in your country,” Miemoukanda adds.

Miemoukanda says that apart from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, most African countries do not have any internet exchanges at all. (South Africa has three internet exchanges in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.)

Furthermore, most African nations rely on the faraway continents of Europe or North America for their internet exchange and data centre requirements.

Factors contributing to the lack of internet exchanges and data centres in Africa include a lack of funding and weak electricity grids, says Miemoukanda.

Miemoukanda further says that most countries on the continent - apart from the likes of SA and Nigeria - have weak telecom markets where there is a heavy reliance on governments to pay for and build internet exchanges. Many governments in Africa, though, have more important priorities than that of web browsing or application speeds, and Miemoukanda says this results internet infrastructure developments being put on the back burner.

However, solutions to work with a lack of infrastructure in Africa and boost internet speeds do exist. Briedenhann says Riverbed is expanding rapidly across Africa with an offering that can remove the number of round trips an internet packet takes to travel over a wide area network, potentially accelerating web browsing and application speeds.

Yet ultimately private business and governments need to step in and build Africa’s internet infrastructure.

And Miemoukanda is confident there could be rapid development in this space in years to come.

“If you look at the long term vision, most African countries want to have knowledge-based economies. It means that they have to change the ICT landscape; so, they have to pump a lot of money into the ICT infrastructure. So, I strongly believe it is going to change in the next five years.”