Sponsors Presentation 00:12 Alberto Mercatali: Okay. Perfect, thanks. [chuckle] I'm Alberto Mercatali, and I work for Telecom Italia Sparkle. I'm here together with my friend from DE-CIX, Arnold Nipper, to introduce in 10 minutes, a new internet exchange point that we have built in Sicily, and this is mostly dedicated to African networks. So that I leave the work to Arnold to introduce the DE-CIX part and then I disclose with some additional note about the Sicily hub. [pause] 01:04 Arnold Nipper: Okay. Hello from my side as well. So I do not want to eat much in your time so you have to length discussion, you have to go to general meeting I guess, everyone understands that we are now rushing a little bit because also the other RIRs also waiting. So just a few words about who is DE-CIX; DE-CIX is running some internet exchanges. You most likely know the one in Frankfurt but besides that we're also doing internet exchanges in Hamburg, Munich, Dubai, New York, and now start as well in Palermo, and Marseille. 01:51 Arnold Nipper: The reason is why we do an internet exchange in Sicily, someone might say, Sicily there's almost nothing... The most interesting thing why we think an internet exchange over there makes sense is because, if you look at this map, a lot of sea cables have landing stations in Sicily, and therefore... Its ideally seated if you also look where Sicily is located in respect to Africa... To open up the sea cables over there and to thereby to give a chance for operate as both network carriers as well as well as content providers, backbone providers to peer over there. So that's the main reason for us to go there by breaking out traffic already there. You save both on money as well and gain some milliseconds on round-trip time and get better performance. This is really important for those on the West African rim, North African rim, East Africa as well as those coming from Europe, of course from Eastern Asia as well as from Asia. 03:17 Arnold Nipper: Also, what you see from this map or this graph which shows the gross of ASN that you see that the number of ASN in Africa meanwhile is overtaking the number of ASN in Europe, and Africa is growing internet wise slowly but constantly and will get more important over the next few years. So maybe it's now time also to bring an internet exchange, an important internet exchange closer to Africa. I skipped it... Most important part, perhaps, will be we are going live end of August this year offering port speeds one gigabit, 10 gigabits, and if someone need, it also 100 gig. Private, public peering; everything is there. If you order now, you get six months your port for free. Next as I head back to Alberto who dives more into detail what Sicily offers. 04:34 Alberto Mercatali: So, the reason why we take this decision of opening Sicily hub in Sicily is mainly before, there are more than 13, so many cables that are currently landing in Sicily. Most of them land in Telecom Italia Sparkle landing station, others are in an independent landing station from mainly for Interoute fast web and others. And currently all the ISP landing in Sicily just purchase ... to go to Europe, or to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris or even London. Many of them asked us to put some equipment in Sicily just to better manage their.....so many infrastructure and the rest of the infrastructure. To make better usage and to have a better protection. We decided to do even more. We have built a new data center where we can host their routers and their equipments, and we can provide all the set of services that they can find in Frankfurt. So the idea is to bring a whatever they can find in Europe, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, or London, or Paris directly in Sicily, and so open the environment there. 06:07 Alberto Mercatali: The idea is just to make a carrier neutral environment over there because of course a peering point must be carrier neutral and a customer there must find everything they need in one place. Additionally, we're providing, we are inviting all the most important CDN and content provider over there just to provide peer interconnection that usually are dealing in Frankfurt or Amsterdam directly in Sicily. So 30 milliseconds closer to Africa and this would be a benefit. Everybody has appreciated this fact and thus agreed to come with us. 07:01 Alberto Mercatali: Additionally, we invited also a couple of alternative providers to offer their services there. So Telecom Italia Sparkle will not be the only one providing bandwidth services, IP services, and so on into Sicily hub, but all the customer that will be there, will find plenty of availability also from other providers. So we'll be completely a carrier neutral point where you will be able to have management with VPN-IP transit, mobile services, even voice services, peering...... I think that that's all. I want to thank you for your attention. I hope not be to so boring, I will leave you. [applause] 08:00 Alberto Mercatali: Thank you. 08:01 Arnold Nipper: Any questions, Andrew? 08:04 Andrew Alston: Yeah, as a matter of interest, will there be options for other providers to join those selling services in the way of TRANSITiQ etcetera, or is that a limited number of people that you've invited to provide those services over the exchange? 08:22 Arnold Nipper: The environment is open, so everybody who has fiber or want to offer services there is invited to come so it's not a closed environment. 08:31 Andrew Alston: In that case I hope to see you there soon. I really hope to see you there soon. Thank you very, very much. [pause] 08:43 Arnold Nipper: Further questions? Unfortunately, Alberto has to leave but I'm around till the afternoon. Thank you. [applause] 08:57 Vymala Thuron: Thank you very much. So if you need the presentation it's on the website and I have the contact details of these gentlemen so if you need more information just come to me and then I can give you email. So next, I don't know if you know this gentleman, Andrew Alston, as our Liquid Telecom. So he's going to give a brief on... [pause] 09:27 Andrew Alston: Hi, guys. I'm not gonna keep you long. I think you've all heard enough of my voice for the day. What I want to talk about a little bit in this slot is the value of IP addresses and I bring this topic to the floor because I think it will increase the participation because I think that members need to be aware of just how valuable our African resources are. And I think it needs to be stated that we need to start looking after these resources a lot better than we currently are. I did an analysis recently of a particular entity and discovered that they were sitting on about three times more space than they were actually using purely because of the way that space had been assigned and then I thought to myself, let me do a risk analysis as to what happens in the event of me being unable to get space from AFRINIC with the growth planned and with the rate of current expansion because I think it's an important... I think every business needs to do quantitative risk analysis on a regular basis. 10:49 Andrew Alston: And so I looked and currently in the secondary market for IP space and whether I agree with it or not, it does exist. IPs internationally are trading for around $12 an IP. That puts IP space at a value of around $800,000 per /16. In the case of someone like Liquid Telecom who is holding very close to a /14 worth of space that values the space at around $2.8 million, $2.9 million in the risk analysis. If I look at expansion in the way that the network is growing and the IP space is going forward, and then I run that risk analysis, I come to the very scary conclusion that if something were to happen to AFRINIC, I'd be sitting in a position where I'd be looking at in excess of a $10 million expense over the next three to four years. 11:53 Andrew Alston: That tells me that space needs to be very carefully protected. It tells me that the community needs to be very well aware of people attempting to take those resources out, there is a growing demand for space. At the same time, I look at the current utilisations and I was running some stats on the current utilisations of AFRINIC. We're sitting 2.71/8 still available, and in approximately the last year we've allocated about 1/10. Now, at that rate we are looking at about, if my calculations were correct, around 10 years before we hit soft landing policy. If we wait that long to use that space and use our resources, we will end up in a situation where the rest of the world comes for it. I'm not proposing selling it, I'm not proposing letting the rest of the world take it. 13:00 Andrew Alston: I'm proposing that we as network providers look very closely at our own networks and ask, "Do we need this space and how are we going to use it? Do we want to continue in the NAT paradigm where we are disadvantaging our users by trying to squeeze every last IP address by translating everything?" I would very strongly argue that that's a very, very bad idea because all that we are doing is creating a legacy dumping ground for equipment that is not IPv6 compliant. And as we move forward, I foresee a situation where sooner or later some website on the internet that lots of people access is going to go, "I didn't wanna pay the 12 bucks an IP for an IP or whatever that price rises to, and I've gone V6 only." 13:51 Andrew Alston: The networks in Africa at that point that are not V6 ready, will be at a distinct disadvantage because the customers will go to those networks that are V6 ready. If we have become a legacy dumping ground, because we have too much V4 space available, we will sit there and when crunch time comes and we desperately need that V6, we'll be unable to do so. And less than a year ago, a bunch of equipment which was supposedly V6 compliant was purchased by another company and it didn't have certain V6 features, particularly MPLS, LDP6, RSVP6, things that are critical to an operator environment. 14:49 Andrew Alston: Then I sat in a meeting, less than two weeks ago in San Francisco and was told by a provider... By the vendor "Sorry. We're not putting V6 in there. Now I've got legacy on there, what do I do?" But the trick here... one more minute. What I'm saying to you is, look at your networks. If you're running NAT, use the space, don't let the rest of the world come and take the space because we are not using it. For goodness sake, there's a billion people on this continent, there's plenty use for it. So take the space and keep in mind that because of the financial value of the space, if we don't use it somebody else will and we will be unable to stop them, no matter what we do. Thanks.