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Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

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Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#41

Post by jgrahamc »

xrjn wrote: post #31
jgrahamc wrote: post #29

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.

What sorts of traffic are you seeing out of Africa? How does it compare to Europe and NA, and do you think it's worth for CDNs and large companies to host content there?

It's definitely worth it for us. We plan to be _everywhere_.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#42

Post by RyanZAG »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #17

In one of Google's lobby there is a 3-D animation of a spinning globe, with spikes that appear wherever and whenever searches are performed, with the height of the spikes being proportional to the rate of query submissions. The recruiter who showed me this was very proud of google's accomplishment and indeed it was impressive to see the spikes erupting from the east and west coast of the US, Europe, Japan and India.…

I'm in Africa and... I'm sorry, but we have nameservers already. That's not really a problem. Are you really talking about DNS servers here? I wasn't sure.

The issues which prevent those spikes you'd like to see on the maps at Google are education (primarily literacy, especially English literacy), access to devices, and culture. Access to devices is being solved by cheap smartphones becoming obtainable to some degree and constant improvements to data networks in African countries, but the other two have no easy solution.

EDIT: To maybe make it a bit easier - consider someone in a village (with a cellphone and access to a data network) who wants to find out why something happened to the carrot he was growing at home. All of us would pop open Google and search about some information about carrots. A guy in a village would head up the road to talk to his friend who's been farming for 50 years and knows about carrots. If you tried to tell him "hey, you could ask Google that question" the only reply you'd get would be "I don't really know about that".

I've had someone come to me to ask me to look up bus fares on the internet for them. They'd hand me a piece of paper with the URL for the bus companies tariff page. Not too interesting until that same person later pulled out his Windows Phone smartphone to make a phone call, and he had full internet access and a good mobile browser on that phone.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#43

Post by akhatri_aus »

jgrahamc wrote: post #40
akhatri_aus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

What sort of error messages are you seeing?

I would have to screenshot it to you when it shows up next and email/tweet it to you. Something along the lines of overloaded, took too long to respond and then the Cloudflare location shows up as Johannesburg.

When it's with HN it shows something like the twitter feed of @HNStatus pointing out the CloudFlare server as Johannesburg with a request id (I think).

When it's with reddit it shows the reddit mascot crushed up with his orange beady eyes over a pile of orange stuff. Scary stuff.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#44

Post by scurvy »

jgrahamc wrote: post #41
xrjn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sorts of traffic are you seeing out of Africa? How does it compare to Europe and NA, and do you think it's worth for CDNs and large companies to host content there?

It's definitely worth it for us. We plan to be _everywhere_.

And sniff/proxy _everything_ for economic gain.

Your company's motives are not pure and altruistic. Don't pretend they are.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#45

Post by mc32 »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #17

In one of Google's lobby there is a 3-D animation of a spinning globe, with spikes that appear wherever and whenever searches are performed, with the height of the spikes being proportional to the rate of query submissions. The recruiter who showed me this was very proud of google's accomplishment and indeed it was impressive to see the spikes erupting from the east and west coast of the US, Europe, Japan and India.…

Google isn't the leading search engine in all countries of the world, so they should not spike everywhere.

I'm surprised you didn't notice Russia and China not spiking as much either.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#46

Post by jgrahamc »

akhatri_aus wrote: post #43
jgrahamc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of error messages are you seeing?

I would have to screenshot it to you when it shows up next and email/tweet it to you. Something along the lines of overloaded, took too long to respond and then the Cloudflare location shows up as Johannesburg. When it's with HN it shows something like the twitter feed of @HNStatus pointing out the CloudFlare server as Johannesburg with a request id (I think). When it's with reddit it shows the reddit mascot crushed…

Feel free to email jgc @ cloudflare DOT com.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#47

Post by jgrahamc »

scurvy wrote: post #44
jgrahamc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely worth it for us. We plan to be _everywhere_.

And sniff/proxy _everything_ for economic gain. Your company's motives are not pure and altruistic. Don't pretend they are.

Your company's motives are not pure and altruistic.

Huh?

Let's be clear: CloudFlare is a for-profit company and hence wants to take in more money than it spends. We do that by getting people to pay us. Our revenue is from web site owners paying us. It's pretty clear what our business model is: pay is a little for bandwidth and hardware is possible, get web site owners to pay us.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#48

Post by aaggarwal »

TD-Linux wrote: post #39
aaggarwal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should take a look at the WebRTC stack. Opus => RTP => DTLS => SCTP => UDP. For simpler applications you can drop parts of that, for example just RTP over UDP if you don't need retransmissions or encryption.

Yes, WebRTC is also a contender, almost final before I came across QUIC. I was also studying it, the application has to be reliable, so except for the DTLS, I can't skip any other layer of stack. I just have to make a final test to compare the reliability and speed characteristics of TCP vs SCTP (and maybe QUIC) for the application. WebRTC also has excellent P2P features, that's again a big plus. Thanks for the help!

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#49

Post by RyanZAG »

jgrahamc wrote: post #47
scurvy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And sniff/proxy _everything_ for economic gain. Your company's motives are not pure and altruistic. Don't pretend they are.

Your company's motives are not pure and altruistic. Huh? Let's be clear: CloudFlare is a for-profit company and hence wants to take in more money than it spends. We do that by getting people to pay us. Our revenue is from web site owners paying us. It's pretty clear what our business model is: pay is a little for bandwidth and hardware is possible, get web site owners to pay us.

That's a nice straight forward business model most people can get behind.

The problem comes later, as it does when any company gets big enough. Few years down the line, the board of directors has a look over the company and see's a big opportunity: all that data you're flowing around can be turned into money with some very clever thinking at 'no real loss to anyone'.

People don't like to leave money on the table if they can just find a clever enough way to put it in their pockets, and more than enough very smart people saying "hey, pay me a little bit and I'll get all that nice money off the table for you - nobody will mind, privacy is dead anyway!"

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