Internet Performance to Africa

Technical Report · Wed Oct 01 04:00:00 EDT 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/826457· OSTI ID:826457

Cottrell, L ^[1]

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1. SLAC

We report the first results ever for real-time Internet performance to Africa using the PingER methodology. Multiple monitoring hosts were used to enable comparisons with performance from different parts of the world. From these preliminary measurements, we have found that Internet packet losses to some African sites in recent months range from very poor to bad (> 12%), some getting better, others are holding steady or getting worse. This, together with the average monthly Round Trip Times, imply end-to-end maximum TCP throughputs that are order of magnitudes different between countries in the region. Africa is shown to be far from the Internet performance in industrialized nations due to the poor infrastructure in place today. These monitoring efforts can provide valuable information to analyze the relative rates of future improvement and today they help us to quantify the digital divide and can provide quantitative information to policy makers.

• Research Organization: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, CA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (US)
• DOE Contract Number: AC03-76SF00515
• OSTI ID: 826457
• Report Number(s): SLAC-PUB-10188
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
AFRICA
INTERNET
MONITORING
P CODES
PERFORMANCE