On the African Peering Connectivity Revealable via BGP Route Collectors

Internet pervasiveness in Africa has been slowly but steadily increasing since the beginning of this millennium. Thanks to several organisations which donated time and resources, it is nowadays possible to claim that the AS ecosystems of several countries in Africa are now experiencing an early stage of the peering era. In this paper, we investigate the capability of the BGP route collectors publicly available to reveal the newborn peering connectivity in African countries. By analysing BGP data available with existing techniques we found that a lot of this connectivity is missing from the dataset, mainly due to the lack of data sources in the region. In most countries, this could theoretically be solved by introducing no more than ten new ASes sharing their full routing information to route collectors.