My company handles live video streaming, so slow speeds and high latency tends to result in a lot of buffering. You're looking at about 200ms latency minimum from Europe to South Africa, and when you need to download a ~2MB video chunk in 2000ms, it's pretty hard to get a reliable stream, especially when you add in generally slower/less reliable connections along the route.
It can be mitigated somewhat by reducing the quality of the video and using CDNs, but even edge nodes are scarce in that are of the world.
I imagine it would be fine for normal applications, aside from being a little slower, but video is a challenge.
Yep. We've had to do some work for clients in Africa in my job. One we did in Morocco was fine from EU data centers on AWS, but South Africa has been very difficult to serve with acceptable latency from any data centre we've tried.
We're 90% AWS here, but would probably use Azure for those clients if they had a data centre in that region.
It can be mitigated somewhat by reducing the quality of the video and using CDNs, but even edge nodes are scarce in that are of the world.
I imagine it would be fine for normal applications, aside from being a little slower, but video is a challenge.