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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

#61

Post by yxhuvud »

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.…

What is your requirement for something to be 'lasting'? I don't expect my code to last forever, but if the code I write manage to be part of something that is state of the art for a while in one particular niche, then that is more than enough for me. The only truly lasting pieces of code are the really basic building blocks, stuff like ntpd. Everything else is ephemeral but evolves over time. Eventually new basic building blocks will appear from that, but the process of getting those are mostly accidental.

As for Africa, it is probably a case of not having gained a critical momentum for the kind of infrastructure the article talks about. This doesn't mean it won't happen - while we don't build CDNs at the place I work, we do build basic infrastructure for access control in wireless and mobile networks, and we are definitely seeing more activity and business from African regions compared to how it was earlier.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#62

Post by hstrauss »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #25

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.

It's that, along with local-loop congestion (and eventually packet loss). Then the retransmits begin.

At least that's my experience with anything cellular-network based.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#63

Post by sitharus »

cldellow wrote: post #51
sitharus wrote: post #35

250ms to Facebook and that 'sucks', glad to see New Zealand's opinion on our internet connectivity is validated! 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?

Amazon does have POPs in Australia, but they cost more so many companies choose not to use them.

Yep, that's why they're only 150ms a lot of the time. CloudFront has a few AU pops, no NZ ones though.

The Singapore and Japan zones help, but most still goes to the US.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#64

Post by yxhuvud »

realusername wrote: post #37

We are currently building applications for our shops in Africa (Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda) at my current company. 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…

That sounds like a challenge! What line of business are you in that can survive that bad connectivity?

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#65

Post by Dylan16807 »

hstrauss wrote: post #62
Dylan16807 wrote: post #25

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.

It's that, along with local-loop congestion (and eventually packet loss). Then the retransmits begin. At least that's my experience with anything cellular-network based.

But the article is talking about plentiful bandwidth over wires. Not a terrible cell link.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#66

Post by nsomaru »

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…

I can confirm this; I'm in Durban, South Africa. It says something about a gateway timeout and pops the HN error page with the twitter feed.

Next time it happens, will screenshot and send to cloudflare.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#67

Post by thaumasiotes »

RyanZAG wrote: post #42
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…

> 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

Speaking as a US native, the reason we'd look for carrot information on the internet is that none of us know anybody with carrot experience. If I knew someone who knew about carrots, they'd see all of my carrot questions before I ever asked the internet.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#69

Post by bjt »

scurvy wrote: post #14
discardorama wrote: post #4

Summary: Nairobi needs a datacenter, with Akamai and Cloudflare.

A local Cloudflare would definitely help with the TLS setup since that's their magic (fast SSL setup without requiring your private key). Akamai could help, depending on the use case. If the content isn't cacheable, there's not much you can do. They do have a service that keeps open TCP sessions from certain POPs back to your origin, thus cutting down on TCP 3-way handshake time. Clients connect quickly, locally and…

Both Cloudflare and Cloudfront (when used as a dynamic content CDN) offer persistent open connections to your origin, as a standard feature of their offering.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/keep-alive/

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168346-B...

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-cloudfront-support-f...

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#70

Post by afarrell »

viraptor wrote: post #55
sitharus wrote: post #35

250ms to Facebook and that 'sucks', glad to see New Zealand's opinion on our internet connectivity is validated! 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?

Same for Australia. (at least outside of state capitals) It's surprising how quickly you can get used to facts like github actually timing out on ssh connection... I really hope that something like ppsp / swarm / ipfs gets integrated into browsers. I'm pretty sure almost every non-user-content file I download every day has been downloaded somewhere in my town. I shouldn't have to go all the way to the US to get it.

https://mosh.mit.edu/ may be of use to you as an alternative to ssh
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