Rebuilding the Internet Exchange Point in Uganda

Abstract

Uganda is a land locked country in South East Africa. It is separated from the Indian ocean by Kenya to the east and Tanzania to the south. It is separated from South Atlantic by the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west. Uganda's connection to the Internet is overland to Mombasa, Kenya where the Seacom cable installed in 2009 connected Mombasa to Europe with a capacity of 640 Gb/s and the World Bank funded Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) undersea fibre optic cable connects Eastern Africa to South Africa and Europe with a capacity of 1.4 Tb/s. [1]. Additionally until recently Uganda was dependent upon a single overland link to Kenya via Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Limited (UETCL) power lines whereas today there are a number of options such as the Seacom cable fibre cable completed in 2015. During the 2010 FIFA World Cup Final a terrorist attack on the Kyandondo Rugby Club in Nakawa, Kampala brought all Internet Service Providers (ISP) in Uganda off-line as the rugby ground sits directly underneath the UETCL power lines bring Internet services from Kenya. This leaves Uganda at significant disadvantage regionally and to-date the technology industry has tended to converge at Mombassa and Nairobi as well as in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Recently however as the modern Internet services require Global Service Providers (GSP) to get closer to the end-user so they can avail of lower latency, higher bandwidth applications, the justification for serving all of South East Africa from data centres in Narobi, Mombassa, Dar es Salaam and even from South Africa is becoming less valid. In order to facilitate the deployment of locally hosted content and reduce the country's reliance on international cables, additional capacity was required at the country's primary local interconnection point, the Uganda Internet Exchange Point (UIXP). UIXP is currently developing its infrastructure to support a larger membership encompassing growing demand from both ISPs and Application Service Providers (ASP). This paper serves to outline the developments that are being put in place to take UIXP from a local Internet eXchange Point (IXP) supporting local ISPs and e-government services to the next level where it is in a position to support GSP Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and therefore pave the way for the next phase of development of the Internet in Uganda.