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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

#111

Post by pyvpx »

having spent a considerable amount of time in the Horn of Africa, the reason African internet connectivity "sucks" is mostly obvious: lack of local talent, substantially increased costs, graft/corruption, and minimal use of peering infrastructure (plenty of peering fabrics, little to no engagement or use)

while I certainly love the excitement this has generated, it's not as easy as "we'll PoP Kenya! We'll PoP Tanzania! We'll PoP all of Africa! 50ms for everyone!"

you would think a place like Djibout with five submarine cables and terrestrial routes into Ethiopia, Sudan, and others, would have a vibrant peering fabric or CDN nodes.

Level3 just put a CDN node in there, and Telecom Italia Sparkle has been there for a while. AFAIK the CDN node is completely under-utilized and Sparkle provides high cost MPLS services for private and governmental outfits; not as much general IP transit.

More work needs to be put in getting carriers to peer at existing points of presence, and costs have to be lowered any way they can.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#112

Post by coldtea »

karmazeroed wrote: post #58
RyanZAG wrote: post #42

Earlier 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.

And instead of basic infrastructure the West (which milked colonial Africa for centuries, and continues to do so post-colonially, placing friendly lackeys in power to ensure underdevelopment and advantageous for them business climate), comes with feel-good schemes like "One Laptop Per Child" etc...

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#113

Post by DocG »

instead of wires, even between citys the internet is transmitted by air. Im currently in southwest cameroon, and only means for access is over the air. At home, I use mobile network. But even in all the cyber cafes, offices, etc they use different over the air solutions. As far as I know, no one is wired directly to the network. And apparently even from this region, traffic goes to douala over the air, where it meets optical sea cable. Oh, and incoming connection is under monopoly. If it goes down, everyone go dark.

There are startups whose plan is to create local network coverin city for high bandwith content, without relaying to the outside connection as this is mostly bandwith limited. So called alternative network of catche servers and wifi, as often even watching youtube is pain depending on the time and location.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#114

Post by MichaelCrawford »

sumedh wrote: post #90
karmazeroed wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My father was an electrical power engineer. It's quite a lot harder than one would think to distribute power with a nationwide grid.

It's never really made sense to me that we even have a nationwide grid. Why not local grids with local power plants? That's what islands use. While there is economy of scale in a big power plant then you need a bigger grid to consume its power.

There are many ways to generate electrical power. I expect many aren't used because power companies can't earn money from them.

I expect you'd have fewer scheduled blackouts if the rural areas had their own local generators.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#115

Post by rasz_pl »

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?

Does your question mean you turned off logging on the servers?

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#116

Post by seanmcdirmid »

mc32 wrote: post #45
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.

China here. Google isn't working, supposedly they have connection issues (but we all know the GFW is blocking it). Not surprising to not get traffic from a country not letting it in.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#117

Post by manarth »

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?

For comparison (Bristol, UK)…

10ms to hacker-news… 130ms to facebook. But only 12ms to a facebook CDN: scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net 10ms to twitter. 13ms to BBC.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#118

Post by sumedh »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #114
sumedh wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My father was an electrical power engineer. It's quite a lot harder than one would think to distribute power with a nationwide grid. It's never really made sense to me that we even have a nationwide grid. Why not local grids with local power plants? That's what islands use. While there is economy of scale in a big power plant then you need a bigger grid to consume its power. There are many ways to generate electrical…

> It's quite a lot harder than one would think to distribute power with a nationwide grid.

I am not an expert on this topic but I am Indian so I know that corruption and apathy play a big role too.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#119

Post by chetanahuja »

Sami_Lehtinen wrote: post #109
chetanahuja wrote: post #95

My company provides mobile app content delivery for a bunch of apps. We use a mobile specific protocol (and backend smarts) that measures and records the latencies for each of these connections. Unfortunately, due to a lack of reasonably easy hosting or cloud solution in Africa, all African traffic is currently served out of Europe. As for sub-saharan countries, Nigeria Kenya and South Africa are the only countries w…

What's the problem with Hetzner? http://www.hetzner.co.za/

Hmm... that's an intriguing possibility. I always thought of Hetzner as a Germany only hosting provider. Thanks for the pointer.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#120

Post by _djo_ »

coldtea wrote: post #112
karmazeroed wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And instead of basic infrastructure the West (which milked colonial Africa for centuries, and continues to do so post-colonially, placing friendly lackeys in power to ensure underdevelopment and advantageous for them business climate), comes with feel-good schemes like "One Laptop Per Child" etc...

South Africa's electricity supply crisis has nothing whatsoever to do with the West or colonialism, it's entirely about bad governance and a lack of long-term planning.

The country has around 40GW of installed capacity, dating from over-investment before 1994, but the state opted to both not build new stations and not carry out any maintenance on the existing stations for years so about 10GW is now offline and unusable. Hence the frequent power outages.

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