Data centres: Critical infrastructure for Africa in the 21st Century


Starting in the mid 1990’s Africa underwent a ‘mobile revolution’ whereby from a standing start of below 1% telephone penetration (tele-density) -  the Continent now boasts over 800 million mobile phones.    By skipping the so-called ‘landline’ technologies the mobile operators leapfrogged a technology generation.  These mobile networks, it can be argued, have been a major contributor to the economic upswing the Continent has experienced since the start of the new millennium.   

The mobile revolution is now over as growth has moderated and penetration levels started to peak.    However, a new revolution beckons - the Internet revolution.  Africa falls behind the Rest of the World when it comes to broadband with less than 15% penetration, mainly in the cities.   During the last 5 years numerous submarine cables have been installed, connecting Africa to the Globe.  These fibre-optic cables are like a 10 lane highway, but with only a single bicycle riding along it.   The opportunity now, is to use this ‘ highway’ more effectively and to start filling the lanes with real traffic.   In parallel much terrestrial connectivity has been put in place with ‘fibre’ laid within many metropolitan areas as well as between them.  

The demand for data services has taken off globally with the advent of high speed mobile technologies like LTE (4G) and high-speed broadband services and we predict the same will happen in Africa.  African mobile users will start to swap out their old handsets for smartphones and their appetite for data services will grow exponentially.   This cohort will form the bulk of a massive upswing in the demand for the creation and consumption of data services, especially video. 

This data will need to be processed, stored and switched.  This data needs to reside somewhere and not on the other side of the World – be it in a data centre in North Carolina or Norway.   African Governments, regulators and customers will demand that this data be stored locally.   We thus predict a large increase in the demand for data centre services.  The Continent is hopelessly underprovided with ‘carrier neutral’ data centres;  (i.e. data centres where SME’s and large enterprises can store their servers or their data and which can connect to other data centres via the public networks.).   The situation is analogous to the paucity of telephone penetration in the early 1990’s.   Apart from countries like South Africa and Kenya there are very few that have data centres to speak of.   Those that there are, have been built by the telecommunications operators, the banks, some Governments and some multinationals, all for their own purposes. 

I contend that this is critical infrastructure for the next phase of growth of the Continent, as important, if not more so, than any roads, railways, power generation capacity and harbours that also need to be built.     

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