PingER data for Africa
To set expectations for the quality of connectivity, it is critical to monitor the performance of the Internet, for instance in remote areas of Africa. Monitoring is important to understand where upgrades are needed and to provide trouble-shooting information.
Following are graphs representing the network performance in terms of TCP throughput for the African institutions which are being monitored.
Detailed data on Internet performance via PuingER and the analysis of its trends in Africa can be found in our recent article: Scientific Measure of Africa's Connectivity.
Visualize African Connectivity
This "Internet Weather"-like map shows the network performance measured from Trieste Italy to African Universities, from April 2007 to March 2008. Darker red dots indicate higher speeds such as enabled by ADSL or better. Clearer, lighter red dots indicate lower speeds, in some cases as poor as 56kbps modems. If a site is unreachable its dot disappears, so flickering dots indicate fragility. If all dots disappear the measurement host experienced an outage. Africa's network performance is over 10 years behind that of Europe and the US and falling further behind. These measurements are made by the international PingER project and provide hard evidence of the extent of the Digital Divide for planners and policy makers. A high-quality version of this video is available upon request.
PingER data for the South
More than 100 institutions from the South are being monitored by the PingER project.
Detailed graphs are available for South Asia and Latin America.