Regional Exchange Points

The first thing Mrs. Emakpore has me looking into is around the initiative to bring regional network exchange points into the West Africa region. This region consists of some 15 countries, nearly identical to the ECOLAS region.

Problem is, most traffic that travels between these countries goes international at extremely high rates (about an order of magnitude). Regional exchange points allow this traffic to stay local to the region and not traverse the international links such as the Sat-3 submarine cable that runs along the west coast of Africa.

Lots of good reasons to do IXP and RXPs but you need funding, cooperation, and a lot of work on regulations, policies and working with encumbents. Apparently there were over 264 IXPs in the world as of July 2004. This would indicate that a number of the issues that face the WATRA region have been overcome somewhere else. Doesn't make it easy, but we should be able to lean on that experience to ease the way.

I produced a draft summary report for her on the topic today.

Kipp