Sub-Saharan Africa is a Dark Zone for World Internet: Sounding an Alarm

1
Sub-Saharan Africa is a Dark Zone for World
Internet Sounding an Alarm

• Prepared by Les CottrellSLAC, presented by
  Warren MatthewsGATech
• Presented at the Supporting International
  Collaborations in Emerging Research and Education
  Networks SIG at the Internet2 Members Winter
  meeting,
• Chicago December 6, 2006
• http//www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/scs/net/talk06/i2
  -dec06.ppt

2
PingER

• PingER project originally (1995) for measuring
  network performance for US, Europe and Japanese
  HEP community
• Extended this century to measure Digital Divide
• Collaboration with ICTP Science Dissemination
  Unit http//sdu.ictp.it
• ICFA/SCIC http//icfa-scic.web.cern.ch/ICFA-SCIC/
  

• 120 countries (99 worlds connected population)
• 30 monitor sites in 14 countries

• Monitor 30 African countries (25 sub-Sahara),
  contain 75 African population

3
World Measurements Min RTT from US

• Maps show increased coverage
• Min RTT indicates best possible, i.e. no queuing
• gt600ms probably geo-stationary satellite
• Between developed regions min-RTT dominated by
  distance
• Little improvement possible
• Only a few places still using satellite for
  international access, mainly Africa Central
  Asia

2000
2006
4
Effect of Losses

• Losses critical, cause multi-second timeouts
• Typically depend on a bad link, so distance
  independent
• gt 4-6 video-conf irritating, non-native language
  speakers unable to communicate
• gt 4-5 irritating for interactive telnet, X
  windows
• gt2.5 VoIP annoying every 30 seconds or so
• Burst losses of gt 1 slightly annoying for VoIP

• Loss by country weighted by population of country
• Note increased coverage

5
Unreachability

• All pings of a set fail unreachable
• Shows fragility, distance independent
• Developed regions US, Canada, Europe, Oceania, E
  Asia lead
• Factor of 10 improvement in 8 years

• Africa, S. Asia followed by M East L. America
  worst off
• Africa NOT improving

SE Asia
L America
M East
C Asia
Oceania
S Asia
SE Europe
Russia
Developing Regions
Africa
E Asia
Developed Regions
US Canada
Europe
6
World thruput seen from US
Throughput 1460Bytes / (RTTsqrt(loss)) (Mathis
et al)
Behind Europe 6 Yrs Russia, Latin America
7 Yrs Mid-East, SE Asia 10 Yrs South
Asia 11 Yrs Cent. Asia 12 Yrs Africa
South Asia, Central Asia, and Africa are in
Danger of Falling Even Farther Behind
7
Divide within Divide Latin America
Brazil
Alberto Santoro
8
AfricaSatellites vs Terrestrial

• Terrestrial links via SAT3 SEAMEW
  (Mediterranean, Red Sea)
• Terrestrial not available to all within countries

Satellite /Mbps 300-1000x fibre costs
PingER min-RTT measurements from S. African TENET
monitoring station
EASSy fibre for E. Africa Will it share sorry
experience of SAT3 for W. Africa?
Mike Jensen, Paul Hamilton
TENET, S. Africa
9
Routing from S Africa

• Seen from TENET Cape Town ZA
• Only Botswana Zimbabwe are direct
• Most go via Europe or USA
• Wastes costly international bandwidth
• Need IXPs in Africa

10
Africa Fibre Links Future

• SAT3 connects eight countries on the W coast of
  the continent to Europe and the Far East.
  Operating as a cartel of monopoly state-owned
  telecommunication providers, prices have barely
  come down since it began operating in 2002

• SAT-3 shareholders such as Telecom Namibia, which
  has no landing point of its own find it cheaper
  to use satellite
• Will EASSy follow suit?
• Another option to EASSy since Sudan and Egypt
  are now connected via fibre, and the link will
  shortly extend to Ethiopia, there are good
  options for both Kenya and Uganda/Rwanda and
  Tanzania to quickly link to the backbones via
  this route

Mike Jensen
11
Costs compared to West

• Sites in many countries have bandwidthlt US
  residence
• 10 Meg is Here, www.lightreading.com/document.as
  p?doc_id104415

• Africa 5460/Mbps/m
• W Africa 8K/Mbps/m
• N Africa 520/Mbps/m
• Often cross-country cost dominates cf.
  international

1 yr of Internet access gt average annual income
of most Africans, Survey by Paul Budde
Communnications
12
Overall (Aug 06)

• Sorted by Average throughput
• Within region performance better (black ellipses)
• Europe, N. America, E. Asia generally good
• M. East, Oceania, S.E. Asia, L. America
  acceptable
• C. Asia, S. Asia poor, Africa bad (gt100 times
  worse)

Monitored Country
13
UNDP Human Development Index (HDI)

• A long and healthy life, as measured by life
  expectancy at birth
• Knowledge, as measured by the adult literacy rate
  (with two-thirds weight) and the combined
  primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment
  ratio (with one-third weight)
• A decent standard of living, as measured by GDP
  per capita.

Africa
PingER - Strong Correlation - Non subjective -
Quicker / easier to update
14
Med. Africa vs HDI

• N. Africa has 10 times poorer performance than
  Europe
• Croatia has 13 times better performance than
  Albania
• Israel has 8 times better performance than rest
  of M East Med. Countries

• E. Africa poor, limited by satellite access
• W. Africa big differences, some (Senegal) can
  afford SAT3 fibre others use satellite
• Great diversity between within regions

15
Scenario Cases

• School in a secondary town in an East Coast
  country with networked computer lab spends 2/3rds
  of its annual budget to pay for the dial-up
  connection.
• Disconnects
• 2. Telecentre in a country with fairly good
  connectivity has no connectivity
• The telecentre resorts to generating revenue from
  photocopies, PC training, CD Roms for content.

Heloise Emdon, Acacia Southern Africa UNDP Global
Meeting for ICT for Development, Ottawa 10-13 July
3. Primary health care giver, somewhere in
Africa, with sonar machine, digital camera and
arrangement with national academic hospital
and/or international health institute to assist
in diagnostics. After 10 dial-up attempts, she
abandons attempts to connect

• 4. Sep 05, international fibre to Pakistan fails
  for 12 days, satellite backup can only handle 25
  traffic, call centres given priority. Research
  Education sites cut off from Internet for 12 days

16
Conclusions

• Last mile problems, and network fragility
• Decreasing use of satellites, expensive, but
  still needed for many remote countries in Africa
  and C. Asia
• Africa 10 years behind and falling further
  behind, leads to information famine
• E. Africa factor of 100 behind Europe
• EASSy project will bring fibre to E. Africa,
  hopefully better access than SAT3
• Africa big target of opportunity
• Growth in users 2000-2005 200, Africa 625
• Need more competitive pricing
• Fibre competition, government divest for access,
  low cost VSAT licenses
• Consortiums to aggregate get better pricing
  (/BW reduces with BW)
• Need better routing - IXPs
• Need training skills for optimal bandwidth
  management
• Internet performance correlates strongly with
  UNDP development indices
• Increase coverage of monitoring to understand
  Internet performance

17
More information/Questions

• Acknowledgements
• Harvey Newman and ICFA/SCIC for a raison detre,
  ICTP for contacts and education on Africa, Mike
  Jensen for Africa information, NIIT/Pakistan,
  Maxim Grigoriev (FNAL), Warren Matthews (GATech)
  for ongoing code development for PingER, USAID
  MoST/Pakistan for development funding, SLAC for
  support for ongoing management/operations support
  of PingER
• PingER
• www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger,
  sdu.ictp.it/pinger/africa.html
• Human Development
• http//www.gapminder.org/
• Role of Internet Exchanges
• event-africa-networking.web.cern.ch/event2Dafrica
  2Dnetworking/workshop/slides/The20Role20of20In
  ternet20Exchanges.ppt
• Case Studies
• https//confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/
  Sub-SaharaCaseStudy
• http//sdu.ictp.it/lowbandwidth/program/case-studi
  es/index.html