How to test a diversity claim before you need it to be true
Every provider will tell you their network is redundant. Redundancy is a property of a physical path, not of a proposal, and there are five questions that separate the two.
The office cupboard was never a data centre
For most of the last decade, keeping records in Somalia meant a server in a room nobody had designed for one. That was not a choice anybody made — it was the absence of an alternative, and the alternative now exists.
What actually belongs in country, and what does not
Data residency arguments tend to produce one of two bad outcomes: nothing moves, or everything does. Neither is right, and the sorting rule is simpler than most migration plans assume.
When satellite is the right answer, and when we will tell you it is not
Satellite is sold hardest to the people who need it least. Four situations where it is genuinely the correct engineering choice — and the cases where we would tell you to take fibre and spend the difference elsewhere.
Coverage is a backhaul problem, not a radio problem
Putting a base station in a town is the easy part. Getting its traffic back to a core network, in a country where most of the route has to be built rather than leased, is what decides whether the site ever gets built.
The outage that costs a bank money is the one at 4pm
Somalia runs one of the most mobile-money-dependent economies in the world, which makes the network underneath it systemically important. For a financial institution, network design is a settlement-risk question wearing a technical costume.
Sovereignty is decided by where the rack is
A digital public service is only as sovereign as the building its records sit in. Four questions settle it, and none of them are answered by a clause in a contract.
Broadcast traffic is not big, it is relentless
A contribution feed does not care what your peak speed is. It cares whether the capacity is there for the whole duration, every time — which is a different product from the one most providers sell.