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Nigeria Can Become Africa’s Internet Hub If… – MainOne

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Vremudia Oghene-Ruemu, MDXi’s product manager, Data Center in this interview assesses the data centre market in Nigeria, challenges confronting the line of business, the partnership with IXPN, MainOne’s Open Connect Service, among others. Excerpts

Data Centre Operations in Nigeria

The Data Center landscape in Nigeria is still new, gradually developing. We have a few data centers for our economic size and population, which means there is opportunity for more operators to come in.

We are gradually building a digital economy, which requires cloud-based services and applications and data centers.

A rising confluence of demand and supply factors is making Nigeria’s data center business one of the most dynamic ICT market segments in Africa.

As broadband adoption has boomed, demand for cloud services has emerged and is expected to surpass supply soon.

To cater to this demand, MainOne’s Data Center Company, MDXi is also building more Data Centers not only in Nigeria, but other parts of West Africa. We have started our second Tier III Data Center in Nigeria in Sagamu, Ogun State; we have a Data Center in Accra and should launch another in Cote D’Ivoire soon.

We believe that other players will follow suit and build to match the growing demand. Right now, South Africa has the largest data center presence on the continent, with North Africa following closely but Nigeria and other West Africans countries are expected to deepen Data Center penetration over the next few years.

Main Challenges Confronting Your Line of Business

The major challenge for Nigerian businesses right now is the high cost of operation. Data Centers have huge power requirements and usually recourse to direct connection to the national grid, which is a significant investment in addition to backups, which include huge generators with attendant costs of diesel ad maintenance.

Operators need to import equipment into the country, but do not have access to FOREX, as the Central Bank has refused to give telcos priority. It has been ingenuity and financial knowhow that has kept players like us going in this tough terrain.

Nigeria is yet to fully implement data domiciliation and a lot of government and enterprise businesses still hosts Nigeria’s data abroad, rather than patronize indigenous data centers.

The Federal Government needs to enable policy to drive our diversification from oil-dependent to services-focused; such as pioneer status for indigenous operators, tax exemptions, data residency and priority access to Forex will go a long way to help Nigeria’s data center operators and enable us be at par with South Africa and other climes.

In China for example, foreign operators are mandated to keep Chinese data within the country. Europe, Russia, Malaysia and Indonesia have also implemented Data Domiciliation regulation.

Nigeria must also proactively protect its citizen’s data and mitigate huge security risks by repatriating all Nigerian data in-country. This will limit the country’s exposure to cyber-attacks, save us huge international internet transit costs and enable Nigeria’s data center capacity to grow quicker.

We need to understand that apart from glaring issues such as national security and capital flight; local data hosting has the ability to drive job growth and improve the lives of our teeming youth population.

Local data domiciliation has worked and is still working in countries with strong digital economies around the world. All you have to do is look around the globe to see what having data hosted in-country has done for local innovation, technology development and economies in general.

Partnership with The Nigerian Internet Exchange (IXPN)

This move is significant in many ways. As a data center provider, there are two goals. The first goal is to ensure that businesses that have high availability requirements can run their technology operations without breaking the bank.

The second goal, is to ensure that the infrastructure running these highly available services can be reached irrespective of the networks that users connect from.

To ensure that end users communicate effectively in this rapidly evolving digital ecosystem, network providers need to enable the exchange of user data in the quickest and most efficient manner using a process called peering. Peering is made possible by an Internet exchange point which in the simplest of terms is a physical meeting point where networks, content and service providers connect and directly exchange data.

This results in the significant reduction of costs and increase in speeds at which data is exchanged thereby leading to consumer friendly network subscription rates and superb end user experiences.

This is where our partnership with the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) is relevant. By hosting and partnering with the IXPN, our data center customers now have quicker, less costly access to local, regional and global connectivity via simple physical cable connections called cross connects.With these cross connects and close proximity to the Internet Exchange, our customers immediately have instant access to an ecosystem of network providers, cloud platforms, content providers and business partners while saving costs on expensive wide area network links and ensuring high network performance.

By combining our vast local, regional and global network resources with the IXPN’s capabilities, we can now directly connect and provide interconnection services to local operators, regional operators, global carriers, content providers, ISPs among others. Our data center’s value proposition is thus to ensure that people that host in our data center are able to reach their users seamlessly with great user experience and at lower costs.

Role of The IXPN

The Internet Exchange is the backbone of digital economies around the world and a key ingredient to growing the online economy in Nigeria.

The role of the IXPN is to ensure the local exchange of data between users by enabling peering between the networks that serve these users; hence the popular saying “keeping local traffic local”.

An example is a situation where an email from User A in Lagos to User B in Lagos needs to travel across User A’s provider network to an International location where User A and User B’s networks connect just because they cannot connect locally.

You can also view this practically from the standpoint of regional airport hubs which serve as an exchange point for passengers between different airlines served by that airport.

Airline passengers will definitely not fancyif they travel long hours to switch flights outside their country to reach a destination in their country just because a common airport that serves multiple airlines in the country does not exist. Routing internet traffic is similar to you flying to Ghana to get a connecting flight to Abuja, because there is no local interconnection point.

Mainone’s Open Connect Service
With Open Connect we are creating a powerful Internet ecosystem in the same physical location as the Nigerian Internet Exchange, and providing a platform for participants to exchange data in real-time at lightning fast speeds.

The idea behind Open Connect is that we are enabling owners of products, services and content with high response requirements become more service-oriented by bringing the networks closer to them. Being closer to the networks significantly enhances their ability to improve their end user experiences. For instance, today’s customer will seriously consider changing banks if they have an internet banking application that takes thirty seconds to open a login page, and takes several other painstaking minutes to conduct a transaction.

Main Benefits of Open Connect
Open Connect provides better network performance for the networks and their end users. It also ensures low latency connections which in turn enhance the end user experience while enabling local data exchange, local content and local hosting.

Before Open Connect, How Did Operators Connect?

In the past, operators connected Internet traffic via networks outside the country at interconnection locations where global content providers reside. This put more costs on internet providers, slowed down internet connections and put the end user at a disadvantage from a cost and user experience.

For voice services, interconnections were achieved through clearing houses some of which are present locally today. These methods of interconnection are no longer sustainable with the volumes of broadband traffic we are experiencing in Nigeria today via current explosion in content and smartphones.

The Nigerian Internet Exchange is currently enabling a limited amount of interconnection between operators today but we believe that a synergy between MDXi and the Exchange using Open Connect as a platform will take interconnections to the next level in Nigeria and West Africa.

With The Launch Of Open Connect Would You Now Consider Yourself A Carrier Neutral Data Centre?

We have always been a carrier neutral data center. For the benefit of your readers, a carrier neutral data center is a facility that allows its customers connect their hosted infrastructure to any network of their choice.

MDXi is structured as a totally separate legal entity from MainOne even though we are a subsidiary company. Customers in MDXi are free to choose any network provider that suits their business requirements and have done so since Day 1. As a result, customers in MDXi are connected to their various locations by over 20 different network operators and ISPs today.

Launching Open Connect expands our commitment to providing that open access, carrier neutral environment and bringing it closer to the Internet Exchange for all our customers to thrive.

Of What Benefit Is This To Over-The-Top (OTT) And Content Providers Across The Continent?

Until around 4 years ago, OTT operators like Facebook and Google hosted outside the continent because the infrastructure to host locally wasnot available and the traffic they generated in Nigeria was quite limited with low internet penetration.

This narrative is however changing as the facilities to host such infrastructure is now available on the continent. Africa’s huge population and rapid mobile broadband adoption is also a major business driver for these large players as they recruit these large number of users to their platforms.

Nigeria is the most populous country on the continent and we are beginning to see more content providers, producers and distributors develop significant interest in our local market. Five years ago we didnot have applications like Facebook Live, Instagram live and WhatsApp video. We also did not have Internet banking and the level of E-Commerce applications that require real-time online connections as we do today.

One of the key value propositions for content is a robust user experience. Accessing content hosted outside the country provides a significantly diminished user experience compared to content hosted within the country. By leveraging local hosting and Open Connect, content providers will improve their user experiences significantly, scale their products and increase user subscriptions which will lead to more revenue.

Plans to Build an Internet Hub in West Africa

By hosting the Nigerian Internet Exchange and leveraging our already active connections to the Ghanaian, Amsterdam and London Internet exchanges we have significantly expanded the reach of our network to other networks in the region and globally.

What is next is to ensure that our partnership with various internet exchanges and content providers across the continent continues to grow using products such as Open Connect to explore new frontiers for interconnections.
We will leverage our strengths as West Africa’s most connected data center to continually localize traffic, reduce transmission costs and improve user experiences which will catalyze the development of other industries such as gaming, content and media which are highly dependent on superior internet connections.


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EAIF Commits Additional US$30M to Support Indorama’s Expansion with Third Urea Plant in Nigeria

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The Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), a Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) company, has committed a US$30 million senior debt facility to Indorama, a leading producer and exporter of fertiliser.

The investment enables the construction of a new plant, port terminal, handling stations, and storage facilities in Nigeria, providing a major boost for the country’s agricultural sector, which is a crucial driver of the country and region’s economic growth.

EAIF acted as a co-lender within a broader debt financing package arranged by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), mobilising US$1.25 billion from a syndicate of impact investors, development finance solutions, and commercial banks.

EAIF’s investment increases the Fund’s lending to the company to $111 million, reflecting a joint-ambition to accelerate Indorama’s growth strategy and Nigeria’s aspirations for diversification and industrialisation.

The new funding unlocks fresh capital to enable the construction of a dedicated port terminal and state-of-the-art urea fertiliser plant, anticipating an increase in its current capacity from 2.8 million metric tons to 4.2 million metric tons per annum.

The expansion leverages the company’s strategic location as a freight-competitive supplier serving the needs of significant urea markets in the southern Atlantic, including Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as West Africa, South Africa and the USA.

The facility bolsters Indorama’s capacity, extending its complex beyond the current two urea fertiliser plants, which is well poised to meet the entire demand of the Nigerian market.

The third urea plant aims to maximise output to meet the food demands of growing populations as disruptions precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis affect food security around the globe.

Global crop production is reliant on the international supply of fertiliser. The landmark project is expected to position Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, as a leading producer of urea among the top 10 producers worldwide.

Contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 9 on Decent Work and Economic Growth, and Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, EAIF’s loan forms part of the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) objective for new infrastructure to drive action on climate and nature.

The construction of the port terminal and third plant is set to begin in 2024, with commercial operations expected to commence in 2026. During the construction phase, it is estimated that over 500 jobs will be generated, further contributing to economic development in Nigeria and beyond.

Commenting on the transaction, Olivia Carballo, Managing Director, Emerging Market, Fixed Income at Ninety One, the fund manager of the EAIF, said: “Our continued support for Indorama demonstrates EAIF’s commitment to harnessing the region’s significant economic prospects.

Africa’s potential for industrialisation is tremendous, and this landmark project is a testament to Nigeria’s enhanced ability to produce and export competitively priced, high-quality fertiliser to farmers in regional and international markets, which will remain a priority for years to come.”

Munish Jindal, CEO, Indorama, said: “Indorama will utilise state-of-the-art technology and adhere to stringent environmental standards to ensure optimal efficiency, product quality and sustainability.

We believe that the establishment of this fertiliser will position Nigeria as a key player in the global agricultural market. We are committed to maximising the potential of this project to benefit farmers, communities, and stakeholders across the value chain.

The involvement of esteemed lenders like the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund will not only help Nigeria’s in becoming one of the largest exporter of the fertilisers in the region but will also address the issues of global food security. We extend our sincere appreciation to all our partners, lenders, and stakeholders for their unwavering support and dedication to our shared vision.”

Sérgio Pimenta, IFC Vice President for Africa, said: “Reliable access to high quality fertiliser is essential for food production and food security around the world. IFC’s investment in Indorama, along with African, Asian, European, and American partners, signals our joint commitment to support the agriculture sector, Nigeria’s economy, and the expansion of Indorama, an important supplier in the global food chain.”


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Lifi.net Achieves 500mbps Speed to Rank among Fastest Internet Providers in Nigeria

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Lifi.net, a fast-growing internet service provider, has attained internet speed that is many times faster than the documented average internet speed in Nigeria as at January 2024.

Lifi.net Image

Latest disclosure by LIfi.net shows that the company now delivers up to 500 megabits per seconds (mbps) internet speed in unlimited services provided to homes and offices. This is higher than the country’s average internet speed of 26.74mbps.

As internet subscriber base increases in Nigeria and hit 161.68 million in January, the quality of internet service provided by operators to their users still constitutes concerns as 2G network which has limited speed dominates the space by covering 57.78%.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) revealed through its latest data that while 3G is responsible for 9.36% of internet users in the country, 4G covers 31.75% of internet access and 5G internet only serves 1.11% of internet users in the country.

This combination explains why Nigeria ranked 93rd on the global mobile internet speed test out of 144 countries tested by Ookla, a U.S-based internet speed analysis firm, in January, putting the country’s median internet speed at 26.74 megabits per second (mbps).

However, Lifi.net (NT/007/22), a licensee of NCC, is among few Internet service providers (ISPs) that deliver fastest internet speed in Nigeria with up 350mbps for homes and 2500mbps for offices while assisting new ISPs with speeds over 5000mbps at the data centre and delivering the capacity to their various hubs at no extra cost.

“For over five years Lifi.net has been a leading network company, providing quality internet solutions at the speed of light and at affordable rates. We have highly technical and hard-working personnel and partners. We are very skilled at managing Cisco and Mikrotik Routers’ deployment, configurations, and integrations, fibre laying, and splicing,” says Abraham Oluwambe, Chief Operating Officer of Lifi.net.

He added that as operators attract more subscribers to their respective networks, they should equally place a premium on upgrading the quality of services to deliver broadband at the fastest internet speed possible.

“Our services are not only widespread but also affordable. We believe in making quality connectivity accessible to all. We understand the importance of budget-friendly solutions. Our cost-effective broadband plans ensure you get the best value for your investment without compromising on quality.

“While providing high-speed and reliable broadband connectivity, operators may choose the floor or the peak performance of its service. At Lifi.net, we always go for the latter,” he said.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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