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Fruit Farming, Free Peering & Africa’s Busiest Internet Exchange - Andrew Owens | Coffee Pump (E135)
· 1 h 01 min · S1 E135
Episode Fruit Farming, Free Peering & Africa’s Busiest Internet Exchange - Andrew Owens | Coffee Pump (E135)
Konnichiwa Fam,
On this episode I sit down with Andrew Owens of NAPAfrica and Teraco, recorded on site at AfPIF in Kigali. Andrew joined Teraco as employee number five in 2008 and helped build NAPAfrica into the largest internet exchange on the continent. We are part of sister companies and have run into each other for years without ever properly sitting down, so this was a long time coming. He is also one of the few people in this industry who will tell you the metric everyone is chasing is the wrong one.
We talk about:
- Getting his first PC out of his dad's pharmacy and building machines from the spare parts
- His first IT job running the software behind 98% of South Africa's fruit exports
- Building wireless networks on farms and in cold storage facilities
- Joining the first official VoIP provider in South Africa under the Telkom monopoly
- Why the network engineer always ended up running the data center, and why he hated it
- Getting locked inside the office at 4am during a Cape Town blackout
- Turning down the Teraco job because he never wanted to touch a data center again
- How his old company going bust two weeks later changed his mind
- The basement paper store that became Teraco's first data center
- Three customers in year one and being told they would be dead in two years
- The court case that opened the market to 400 networks overnight
- Why NAPAfrica made peering completely free, and why free is the hardest thing to sell
- How MWeb cutting their transit and peering in London changed everything
- Going from 300 megabit in year one to 7.5 terabits today
- Why he thinks throughput is the wrong thing to measure
- Building an internet exchange for $1,000, and why the community is the hard part
- The truth about CDNs changing their peering policies
- Why NAPAfrica will not expand into Kenya or Nigeria
- What AI actually changes about peering
- Cars, consoles his kids confiscated, and why South African gaming has not taken off
Hope you enjoy the episode.
Best,
Team Coffee Pump
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Find Andrew Owens:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-owens-16765572/
Recorded in collaboration with AfPIF and the African IXP Association:
AfPIF: https://www.afpif.org
AF-IX: https://www.af-ix.org
Equipment supplied by Cameras Africa:
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