31–40 of 127 posts
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.
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.
That being said the speed boost is very obvious :)
Elephant in the room here -> There's no money to be made there (yet)
Check out the prices from vendors. Also, check out the profits. Also the margin! from the ISPs. Take into account the Capex too. Everything will seem odd, except the volume of data consumed per user [which is related, or better said limited to the maximum actual bandwidth]
Safaricom which is well known for its MPESA platform is the most profitable firm in sub saharan africa [not south africa or nearby] and it's all because of data.
Datacenters are difficult:
- Higher cost of electricity
- Unreliable electricity (blackouts and under-rated voltage)
- Costs of acquiring equipment/servers
- Heating/Cooling is on the harder side
- Lack of competition means pricing is farther up on the higher end
- Back down to cost of data, which is really expensive per GB or to lease the fiber required.
Another thing is there is a large latency chunk added as the vast majority of consumers use 3G which adds another chunk of latency in. This is slightly disincentivising to add in local datacenters.
It may be worth noting AWS is actually run in great part from Cape Town. Everyone uses their data centers in Virginia yet does anyone wonder why AWS doesn't offer anything in South Africa when it's being built here?
Elephant in the room here -> There's no money to be made there (yet)
Continent with the fastest growing middle class, though.
Like any business, we'll get the low hanging fruit first, then move on to the higher, harder to reach branches. We'll improve Internet service in Africa, but not before the time is right.
I routinely see 270-300ms pings to facebook. Anything on Amazon's CDN is at 150ms that as is CloudFlare. Akamai does have local nodes, as does Google but the lack of competition on the cable makes it slow.
Guess I should move to Kenya?
That is suprising to me. I lived in Tanzania for a year, and while the internet connection there was not perfect by any stretch of immagination, I had way less ping than this (100 ms to London, where my company's servers are, 120-150 to Boston). For reference, that is: aerial to my ISP two kilometers away, then fiber to Dar Es Salaam, then Seacom to Mombassa, then Seacom again to Marseille, then terrestrial fiber to…
Kenya is not even the worst of all three, Uganda is really a disaster in terms of connectivity. In Uganda it's even difficult to get actual phone signal in most of the country. And you never have reliable Internet anyway, it works like half of the time even if you are in the few right places in the country. Building applications for this kind of environment has been quite challenging.
In a few shops in Uganda, the only way to get data back is by USB keys, so you have an actual truck going there with data to send to the shop and data to get back from the shop. We are building connectivity out of trucks and USB keys.
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. It is a ways off from being solidified as an RFC AFAIK, but it serves a healthy portion of Google's traffic. So, more than an experiment but less than a standard.
I was looking for a reliable audio streaming method for a project, I came across QUIC and was in process of studying it. Its definitely seems to be the future, but I am still unsure though about using it for the project.
For simpler applications you can drop parts of that, for example just RTP over UDP if you don't need retransmissions or encryption.
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.
Your Johannesburg PoP is always crashing and gives lots of error messages. Very noticeable every few days with Reddit and HN [clearly shows Johannesburg as the PoP on the error message]. That being said the speed boost is very obvious :)