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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

#101

Post by mappu »

nsomaru wrote: post #66
akhatri_aus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lacking any further context i'm almost certain this isn't an issue with cloudflare, instead with the upstream web server.

I saw a cloudflare gateway timeout on HN within the last hour, and the twitter feed had a recent post excusing some technical issue.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#102

Post by akhatri_aus »

mappu wrote: post #101
nsomaru wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lacking any further context i'm almost certain this isn't an issue with cloudflare, instead with the upstream web server. I saw a cloudflare gateway timeout on HN within the last hour, and the twitter feed had a recent post excusing some technical issue.

These don't have the twitter feed excusing the issue, the last tweet was a days prior when it happened last. It's as if they only affect African users, the Johannesburg PoP is also used by Kenyan users.

At first, I wondered why the HN Feed never explained the downtime. Then it made sense, it must be cloudflare.

Given that CloudFlare is everywhere & on everyone's websites, it's a pain when it behaves this way affecting users all over a continent.

Uptime websites also report the site as up.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#103

Post by hrrsn »

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?

I don't think you're being completely fair. We have excellent infrastructure, especially compared to Australia. Cloudflare now has NZ caches (and they peer locally) so HN is 3-5ms for me. Facebook has strange routing which seems to go via Auckland -> Australia -> California -> North Carolina rather than directly to the USA, which explains the added latency.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#104

Post by dweekly »

scurvy wrote: post #50

Bummer about all those IPv4 traceroutes. I'd like to see the output of IPv6 traceroutes or mtr output.

Sadly the majority of consumer traffic is still on IPv4; so if you want to understand what regular people are experiencing - it will be v4 traffic. The network I was on in this case for doing the testing was v4-only. All that said, I'd be quite keen to see where v6 peering is happening.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#105

Post by aaggarwal »

TD-Linux wrote: post #94
aaggarwal wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

If it has to be reliable as in no loss is allowed, you're going to need slightly higher latency. If TCP-level latencies are acceptable, maybe you should look at icecast. It's super simple to set up, and works in most browsers directly.

Thanks for sharing, icecast looks nice. However, it doesn't relate to the type of application I was trying to build. I was trying to improve over TCP latencies, that's why I was looking over reliable but faster protocols at transport level.

I will probably benchmark everything later and share it with everyone.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#106

Post by stuaxo »

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.…

Sounds like the spikes should be the higher depending on how slow they are, that would make people want to fix it.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#107

Post by nroets »

hstrauss wrote: post #59
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 African here. There's the electricity issue (we call the rolling blackouts "load-shedding") which affects the cellular base-stations and telco exchanges as much as anything, but also another more obvious issue for content delivery: the local loop. For the past 15+ years (as long as I've had Internet access), the incumbent telco (TelkomSA) has not been forthcoming with upgrading or maintaining the ADSL infrastru…

I also live in South Africa.

Our mobile networks are in pretty good shape:

* Anyone can buy a prepaid SIM from any supermarket and access the Internet within 10 or 20 minutes. Last time I visited France, it took me 4 days to achieve a similar result.

* Mobile data is cheap when buying in bulk. I pay USD2 per gigabyte.

* LTE coverage is growing fast and RTT is good. For example my ping time to google.com is 30ms.

Conclusion: Private ownership and free markets lead to good service and low cost. ESKOM proves that state ownership of companies and monopolies lead to bad service at high cost.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#108

Post by MichaelCrawford »

yxhuvud wrote: post #61
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 bui…

I want to leave something behind for others when I'm gone.

Most of the code I've ever written, if it will build, won't run on today's computers. While it could be made to by porting a few years after that again it won't work.

Consider Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; you can find them in any library and most good bookstores despite having been composed almost 3,000 years ago.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#109

Post by Sami_Lehtinen »

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/

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#110

Post by floatboth »

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.

Google is second to Yandex in Russia, but still very, very popular.
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