climate and comms

After two days of data centre conferencing in Monaco what emerges is consensus about a few things.    The imminent impact of the Internet of Things, outsourcing, virtualization, Colocation and the ongoing migration to the Cloud,   but also the awareness that there exists a massive shortage of data centre capacity in Africa and the urgent need to address it.    There is more data centre capacity within the M25 of London than on the whole continent of Africa. However, where there is some disagreement is exactly how to go about it.   Where to build?   Who to build?   How to build?   Who to finance?     Doing business in Africa is not easy.   But we are inspired by JFK–– “ We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard ".       Africa is hardly the moon but to some people it might as well be! Power, that ever present bogeyman, seemingly presents one of our b...

I have been waiting for Jeremy Rifkin to get with the African program.   It was only a matter of time.   For those of you who don't know, he is the guy who wrote ‘ The Third Industrial Revolution’ ( http://thethirdindustrialrevolution.com/ ) which is the story of the convergence of the communication and energy revolutions.   In it he talks of the rapidly emerging trend of local power generation and the sharing of that power laterally across the grid analogously to WiFi sharing between adjacent WiFi networks.    This is very powerful because it obviates the need for large capital projects for power generation – which have the downsides of : long lead times, centralised monolithic infrastructure, large expensive and wasteful distribution networks - all well illustrated by the current Eskom debacle. It is not widely known that only about 15% of Africans have access to power.   Millions of African children are forced to read by the lig...

It is a little known fact that the Internet is one of the largest contributors of carbon emissions.    ( http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-footprint-internet ) Today 9/21/2014 [1] is a significant date in the climate change calendar,   being the largest climate march in history ( http://peoplesclimate.org )   It is a day when awareness of the impact of global warming will perhaps reach a critical mass and the decision-makers will finally wake up.   How many more Katrina’s,   Sandy’s or Haiyan’s will it take to shock the hardcore minority ( denialist’s and their patrons – i.e. the fossil fuel industry )   into realising that it can no longer be   “business as usual”.    I work in the Internet industry – building data centres.    Our work is in Africa where the potential (negative) impact of climate change could be the highest of any region in the World.    As local weather patterns chan...