Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#21

Post by scarmig » Sat, Jun 13, 2015, 6:54 PM UTC

Epenthesis wrote: post #16

scurvy wrote: post #11

Elephant in the room here -> There's no money to be made there (yet)

The question then: Is there sufficient first-mover advantage that a far-minded company setting up a datacenter there now could reap the benefits when there is money to be made?

I think this leaves out something critical: information infrastructure isn't merely something you deliver to a region to extract profits from it, but something that accelerates growth and helps build a civil society and flourishing middle class.

If I had a couple billion dollars to blow, I'd be spending it on that. Though, maybe that's why I don't have a couple billion to blow =)

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#22

Post by tribaal » Sat, Jun 13, 2015, 6:54 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #10

davidu wrote: post #5

We have contemplated a POP in Kenya. We will get there. Johannesburg should be less than 200ms, so let me see if I can improve that... I would expect about 100ms.

JHB to Europe is generally round the 190ms mark. 170 if you're closer to the undersea cables. No way you're going to drop that to 100ms.

JHB is much further away from Europe than Kenya, though.

JHB means usually going to Cape Town first, then up the west coast of the continent, wheras Mombassa uses SeaCom, going around the east of the continent. That saves a lot of time from a pure distance perspective alone.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#23

Post by aaggarwal » Sat, Jun 13, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

scurvy wrote: post #12

aaggarwal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is QUIC protocol out of experimental phase?

It's only in Chrome and only supported by Google's web server. They are using it though. You can see the stats by going to chrome://net-internals/#quic They are "working" to get it into Apache Traffic Server.

Yeah, its communicating over port 443. Apache Traffic Server would sure be a big step forward, if and when that happens.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#24

Post by scurvy » Sat, Jun 13, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

Epenthesis wrote: post #16

scurvy wrote: post #11

Elephant in the room here -> There's no money to be made there (yet)

The question then: Is there sufficient first-mover advantage that a far-minded company setting up a datacenter there now could reap the benefits when there is money to be made?

Far-minded and deep pocketed. Opening a POP in any new country requires a lot of capex, opex, and human capital (legal, coordination, ops, etc).

This glosses over the fact that your service even can geo-scale well over high latency and high jitter networks.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#25

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Jun 13, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

Taking one second to establish the connection doesn't really explain a 12 second load time. TCP takes a little bit to ramp up, but not 30 round trips.

Plus you have TCP preconnect as a lightweight way to avoid that initial delay.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#26

Post by notahacker » Sat, Jun 13, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

Epenthesis wrote: post #16

scurvy wrote: post #11

Elephant in the room here -> There's no money to be made there (yet)

The question then: Is there sufficient first-mover advantage that a far-minded company setting up a datacenter there now could reap the benefits when there is money to be made?

Judging by how quickly certain African countries have taken to mobile payments - in the cases of much of the population, skipping banking altogether - there's plenty of money for those with the right vision.

The profits from serving ads for consumer goods will be pretty slim though.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#27

Post by scurvy » Sat, Jun 13, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #18

Northern China talks to Southern China through Japan, to the extent that they talk at all. All of China at first had one state telecom monopoly, but then some party official set his son up with Northern China. What was left of the state monopoly won't route to it. My take on what to do about that is to set up servers in both north and south that have website mirrors, as well as a geographically-sensitive nameserver.…

China Telecom also has a separate AS dedicated to high party officials, VIP's, etc. It still goes through GFW, but it goes through a dedicated, higher performant GFW.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#28

Post by Apocryphon » Sat, Jun 13, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

scurvy wrote: post #11

Elephant in the room here -> There's no money to be made there (yet)

Continent with the fastest growing middle class, though.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#29

Post by jgrahamc » Sat, Jun 13, 2015, 7:02 PM UTC

This is why CloudFlare is building out PoPs in Africa. Our goal is to be 10s of ms from people living there, not 100s, so that people who use CloudFlare for their sites provide a great experience in African countries.

We are already live in Johannesburg and there will be many more.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#30

Post by MichaelCrawford » Sat, Jun 13, 2015, 7:05 PM UTC

scurvy wrote: post #27

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #18

Northern China talks to Southern China through Japan, to the extent that they talk at all. All of China at first had one state telecom monopoly, but then some party official set his son up with Northern China. What was left of the state monopoly won't route to it. My take on what to do about that is to set up servers in both north and south that have website mirrors, as well as a geographically-sensitive nameserver.…

China Telecom also has a separate AS dedicated to high party officials, VIP's, etc. It still goes through GFW, but it goes through a dedicated, higher performant GFW.

The US Government, at least at one time had something called FTS, for the federal telecommunications system. It was a private phone system for Uncle Sam.