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, 2006http://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/scs/net/talk06/i2-dec06.ppt

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/

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

• ~120 countries (99% world’s connected population)• ~30 monitor sites in 14 countries

World Measurements: Min RTT from US• Maps show increased coverage • Min RTT indicates best possible, i.e. no queuing• >600ms 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

Effect of Losses• Losses critical, cause multi-second timeouts• Typically depend on a bad link, so ~distance independent• > 4-6% video-conf irritating, non-native language speakers unable to

communicate• > 4-5% irritating for interactive telnet, X windows• >2.5% VoIP annoying every 30 seconds or so• Burst losses of > 1% slightly annoying for VoIP

• Loss by country weighted by population of country

• Note increased coverage

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

US & CanadaEurope

E Asia

C Asia

SE Europe

SE Asia

S AsiaOceania

Africa

L America M East

Russia

DevelopedRegions

DevelopingRegions

World thruput seen from US

Behind Europe6 Yrs: Russia, Latin America 7 Yrs: Mid-East, SE Asia10 Yrs: South Asia11 Yrs: Cent. Asia12 Yrs: Africa

South Asia, Central Asia, and

Africa are in Danger of Falling

Even Farther Behind

Throughput ~1460Bytes /(RTT*sqrt(loss))(Mathis et al)

Divide within Divide: Latin America

BrazilAlberto Santoro

Africa:Satellites vs Terrestrial• Terrestrial links via SAT3 & SEAMEW (Mediterranean, Red Sea)• Terrestrial not available to all within countries

PingER min-RTT measurements fromS. African TENET monitoring station

EASSy fibre for E. AfricaWill it share sorry experience of SAT3 for W. Africa?

Mike Jensen,Paul HamiltonTENET, S. Africa

Satellite $/Mbps 300-1000x fibre costs

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

Africa: Fibre Links Future

– 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

• 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

Mike Jensen

Costs compared to West• Sites in many countries have bandwidth< US residence

– “10 Meg is Here”, www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=104415

• 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 > average annual income of most Africans, Survey by Paul Budde Communnications

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 (>100 times worse)

Mo

nit

ore

d C

ou

ntr

y

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

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

Scenario Cases

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

Heloise Emdon, Acacia Southern

AfricaUNDP 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

1. 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.

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

More information/Questions• Acknowledgements:

– Harvey Newman and ICFA/SCIC for a raison d’etre, 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/event%2Dafrica%2Dnetworking/

workshop/slides/The%20Role%20of%20Internet%20Exchanges.ppt • Case Studies:

– https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Sub-Sahara+Case+Study

– http://sdu.ictp.it/lowbandwidth/program/case-studies/index.html