Web4Africa announces West Africa's first mirror project

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Access to bandwidth in Nigeria is expensive compared to most parts of the world and a major contributing factor is the high cost of international transit. This is due in part to the fact that most of the content consumed by Nigerian internet users is generated outside the country making most bandwidth access essentially international.

Web4Africa’s aim is to reduce the high cost by bringing free and open-source content closer to end-users in Nigeria. Another benefit of this project is low latency. By bringing the content closer to the user, as we are doing in the case of the Nigerian Mirror project, the user experience is greatly enhanced with faster downloads.

Developers using opensource programming languages and users of Linux Operating Systems in Nigeria are among the direct beneficiaries of this project, provided their Internet Service Provider peers openly at the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN).

The mirror is presently hosting the full repositories of Ubuntu and CentOS (both Linux Operating Systems), as a well as Python Package Index (a programming language), in Nigeria. The project has official recognition from CentOS and Ubuntu respectively as it has already been integrated into their official distribution network. Suggestions regarding which other Operating Systems and open-source software to mirror in Nigeria are currently being taken via email to admin (at) mirror (dot) ng.

“We, at IXPN, are delighted by this initiative from Web4Africa to localise popular open-source content. It is the first of its kind in Nigeria. We commend them in their effort toward local Internet data hosting, which is the best way to drop the cost of internet access while improving user experience. IXPN totally aligns with the Nigeria Mirror Project and we call on other organisations to emulate this kind of project, so as to build a better Internet ecosystem for our country,” says the managing director, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), Muhammed Rudman.

“This project, in addition to the immense benefits it brings to the Internet ecosystem in Nigeria, is one of our ways to give back to the local Internet community and is only a first step,” says Oluniyi Ajao, managing director of Web4Africa.