Nigerian post views come in their thousands, but LinkedIn does not know them

A thought that frequently persists with me when I create a new post on Linkedin… Where are my viewers really located?

85%+ of my connections are based in Nigeria and its reasonable to expect most of my viewers would be there. I’ve had formative years in Trinidad, and of course by birth I am Irish with ancestry all the way back to Fir Bholg and beyond.

This is a deep triangle of ‘being’ that I take with me everywhere else.

My market for most of the last twenty years has been Nigeria with a collateral exposure to a lot of West Africa. Much of the content I create here on LinkedIn is market centric, a sensible position to take as the platform is a tool for business and career promotion.

As part of my interest in auditing how effective I am on the platform, of course I am curious to find out where my viewers are based.

Is the location of the relevant ‘Tier 1 Network Peer’ an issue?

Tier 1 Networks are huge interconnected data-centres that connect with each other right across the world. The simplest way to describe them is to consider them internet mirrors. That is storage locations of every website and piece of online content in the world at any time. They constantly update each other over the connections they have with each other.

This means that when an end user makes a demand for access to particular online content, the data request only needs to follow the path through sub provider(s) reaching the primary provider in the commercial chain, and not all the way to some other Tier 1 Network much further away, where the content author or website admin created the content or update.

To be a Tier 1 Network they have to meet two key criteria –

1. Reach every other Tier 1 network on the Internet solely via settlement-free interconnection
2. Provide ‘IPv6’ routing/connectivity across each ‘peer’ connection.

There are roughly twenty Tier 1 networks in the world. Countries that have one or more Tier 1 Networks include France, Germany, Hong Kong,  Japan, India, Italy, Spain, Sweden, UK and US.

It may be, then that my Irish, Nigerian, and Trinidadian viewers are being misidentified with the location their connection is getting Tier 1 Network service from.

This however, does not explain why I am told when I have visitors in either Johannesburg or Cape Town in South Africa.

Bitco site in South Africa claims Axxess, Bitco, Cool Ideas, Frogfoot, and  Seacom, are Tier1 networks, but I can’t find any independent verification of this. It is more than likely that, at best,  while these providers ‘may’ have settlement free connections with each other, they are each most likely paying transit fees for peering with a limited number of global Tier 1 Networks outside Africa.

Wikepedia article on Telecoms in South Africa focuses on the usual suspects of  Vodacom, MTN, Cell C,  and Telkom but doesn’t say how they get their internet. It also only mentions Axxess and Seacom in the last paragraph while referring to Seacom as a submarine cable only.

Separately, AFRINIC, based at Mauritius, which is the controller of IP allocation for the continent, has not succeeded in implementation of IPv6 yet, and for the most part is on IPv4. Until this is resolved it’s additionally difficult to see how any provider in Africa can be deemed Tier 1.

I’ve scoured the internet for any explanation of why LinkedIn cannot give me accurate stats on my my Irish, Nigerian, and Trinidadian viewers but can specify South African ones. Clearly services in South Africa are able to meet some sort of criteria LinkedIn is recognising, which services in Ireland, Trinidad and Nigeria are not.

It is a curious development in the light of my most recent Tekedia Institute article exploring the skill of search engine use, but I have drawn a blank.

It however is an opportunity for me to throw down the gauntlet to contributors who in Ndubusi Ekekwe’s push of my article on LinkedIn, described themselves as ‘Googlers Par Excellence’

I’ve little interest in the viewing exploits of those in Alberta, Canada, but am hugely interested in qualitative divergence between Lagos and Abuja.

It seems absurd to me that LinkedIn cannot offer comparative internal stats on the biggest economy in the biggest continent in the world.

Until it does, the periodic spam trying to entice me back as a premium user will fall on my selective eyes. It may be in view, but it will not meet my vision.

References and Acknowledgements (not in the main text body) :

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_2_network

www.bitco.co.za/5-of-the-best-south-african-telecom-fibre-companies-why/

www.internetgovernance.org/2021/08/16/the-narrative-crisis-at-afrinic-apple-breaks-privacy-gifct-participation/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_South_Africa