Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#91

Post by dublinben » Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 2:34 AM UTC

higherpurpose wrote: post #7

Solution: let's replace the "Internet" with only 100 faster-loading websites that we (and the local governments) approve. Win-win, right?

I can't help but notice that the writer is only checking US-based websites. I'm sure that local alternatives actually hosted in-country are much faster. Why should users in Kenya care about loading some Silicon Valley dating app?

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#92

Post by samuell » Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 2:45 AM UTC

This is interesting! It makes me wonder if it could also explain why AJAX based google apps like Gmail totally don't work in Addis Abeba in neighboring Ethiopia, even on the speediest of hotel wifis (really, the download speed was not bad, except for the initial lag). And I mean totally don't work ... gmail.com just gives a blank page, while the plain html version works.

I have been wondering if it could be something with limits of the number of multiple connections, or even requests, affecting the AJAX requests in the background, or some kind of unfortunate timeout limit in the javascript layer.

Not sure, but with this info, I'm of course thinking more about the lag.

Would be interesting with more details on how it affects typical AJAX apps!

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#93

Post by hueving » Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 2:47 AM UTC

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.

That's somewhat helpful but won't be useful for anything uncachable (e.g. Someone's Facebook wall, twitter feed, emails, etc).

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#94

Post by TD-Linux » Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 4:14 AM UTC

aaggarwal wrote: post #48

TD-Linux wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#95

Post by chetanahuja » Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 4:26 AM UTC

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 where we see any significant traffic at all. And yes, the latencies are horrible, but if we look at our worldwide traffic, there are bad mobile connections everywhere (even in US and Europe) and we have specifically designed the protocol to minimize roundtrips and handle losses more cleverly than TCP, so we do ok under these conditions (though clearly not as well as we would if we had extensive server presence in the continent).

There is some slight chance that Amazon or Google might introduce compute cloud nodes in Africa... as soon as that happens, we'd love to extend our presence there. And if that's not forthcoming in the near future, we'll definitely explore other hosting options (as we've done in India for now).

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#96

Post by chetanahuja » Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 4:27 AM UTC

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 where we see any significant traffic at all. And yes, the latencies are horrible, but if we look at our worldwide traffic, there are bad mobile connections everywhere (even in US and Europe) and we have specifically designed the protocol to minimize roundtrips and handle losses more cleverly than TCP, so we do ok under these conditions (though clearly not as well as we would if we had extensive server presence in the continent).

There is some slight chance that Amazon or Google might introduce compute cloud nodes in Africa... as soon as that happens, we'd love to extend our presence there. And if that's not forthcoming in the near future, we'll definitely explore other hosting options (as we've done in India for now).

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#97

Post by sitharus » Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 5:00 AM UTC

WildUtah wrote: post #83

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?

HTTP 2.0 is going to be great for you Kiwis.

It is, so is QUIC. My employer hosts in the US but serves to NZ so I've been experimenting with new protocols to improve performance, it's always interesting.

Still won't shake the pain that is a single connection to the rest of the world (the AU links are only used for local traffic).

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#98

Post by kukkukb » Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 5:42 AM UTC

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'm in Johannesburg, and my ping to facebook.com is 310ms. The thing is everyone seems to be used to the lag, so there isn't any complaints.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#99

Post by kukkukb » Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 5:46 AM UTC

akhatri_aus wrote: post #32

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.

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 :)

We experience the same kind of thing to assembla.com. It often times out. Quite frustrating when in the middle of development.

Re: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

#100

Post by dweekly » Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 5:48 AM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #91

higherpurpose wrote: post #7

Solution: let's replace the "Internet" with only 100 faster-loading websites that we (and the local governments) approve. Win-win, right?

I can't help but notice that the writer is only checking US-based websites. I'm sure that local alternatives actually hosted in-country are much faster. Why should users in Kenya care about loading some Silicon Valley dating app?

Without debating whether or not it's a good thing, it's inarguable that a healthy portion of the apps that are popular worldwide (outside China) are run by companies headquartered in the US: Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Google, Twitter, Instagram. And now Uber.

Given that each one of these has the vigorous majority of their users outside the US and most have substantial non-US infrastructure build, it gets a little strange to label them "US-based".

But I think it's fair to point out that if performance lags to the extreme it may open market opportunities for local competitors to differentiate themselves with speed. Local hosting options are limited, however, making things more challenging for indigenous entrepreneurs. I was amused and appalled to find that many "Kampala web hosting" companies are actually themselves hosted in Los Angeles.

So: not much is hosted in-country. Very little traffic terminates domestically outside caches.