>Apple Company
Huh? I thought they're Apple, Inc.
Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
81–90 of 127 posts
Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
#82In 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.…
> There were modest spikes in south africa and brazil. Not many anywhere else. Huh? South America has good overall Internet penetration[1] and Chile is going to 70% right now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
South America is the most sparsely populated continent except Australia and Antarctica. The Amazon and Patagonia regions host very little human population (thank goodness).
So South America would always show up as a few big coastal cities with vast emptiness inside, even with huge search penetration on Google's cool visualization. It really doesn't tell you much either way without raw data.
Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
#83250ms 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?
HTTP 2.0 is going to be great for you Kiwis.
Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
The board of directors that would make this decision would have to be a pretty short-sighted one.
Most companies that see a lot of traffic, could decide to engage in shady side activities to monetize every bit of data they see. But no leadership in their right mind would want to take that sort of gamble.
It's interesting that the "evil eye of sauron" argument always comes up for discussion involving CloudFlare, but is never even mentioned for companies like Akamai. My guess is because of the freemium approach which "has to have a catch, right?". But CloudFlare is a proven business model with substantial revenues coming from people who like and trust the service. There is no catch.
ps. former employee here who joined on the idea, and still firmly believes of offering a quality service for a very affordable cost, without being deceitful.
Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
If CloudFlare even hinted that it was thinking of playing fast and loose with its customers' data, it would be out of business very quickly.
Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a challenge! What line of business are you in that can survive that bad connectivity?
We are selling small solar panel kits in small towns on those three countries. The goal is to have a few lights in places where there is no electricity grid at all (it's a for-profit company, not charity). We handle pretty much everything ourselves there since there is not a lot of services pre-built to help you. The shops are selling the kits on payplan since it's quite expensive for the local purchase power. We are…
Sounds like you could branch out and offer these infrastructure services to other businesses, too.
Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Yes, but this is the central advantage of distributed information: while your carrot-farmer buddy is a higher-bandwidth and possibly deeper source of carrot information than google is, that guy doesn't know so much about goat husbandry. Or fishing. Or roof construction, or car repair, etc. So if carrot info is all you ever need, great -- but otherwise, you are going to need nearby buddies who are experts in many, man…
I plan to live out my whole life knowing nothing about carrot farming, goat husbandry, fishing, roof construction, or car repair.
What's going on here is that Africa isn't really reaping the benefits of specialization of labor in the way the civilized world is. The guy in the example isn't even growing multiple carrots! When I get a problem with my roof, I'm not going to try to fix it myself after a crash course in Google-based roof repair. I'm going to pay someone else to do it for me. I do the same when I want to eat fish or goat, or fix my car. The whole point of a developed economy is that you don't know how to produce the stuff you need. Instead, you produce what you're good at producing, and everyone reaps the gains from trade.
The title of this piece strikes me as a little over-specific. What in sub-Saharan Africa doesn't suck?
Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
#88Hmmm, I live in India and I get ~280 ms ping to Facebook and 180 ms ping to Twitter. Seems mostly an issue of "not-living-in-the-US".
Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
#89Is there a way to read this posting without having to log into Facebook?
Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yes, the issues are substantially bigger. South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities, never mind elsewhere. People living there tell me it's not a problem. If they're not bothered by that, I doubt they give a damn about google searches. If memory serves me correctly that's been going on for about 10 years now.
> South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities
Even India cannot provide reliable electricity to its cities. Rural India has scheduled blackouts for 6-7 hours a day.