What is PingER?

PingER (Ping End-to-end Reporting) is the name given to the Internet End-to-end Performance Measurement (IEPM) project to monitor end-to-end performance of Internet links, developed by the IEPM group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The network performance of more than 300 hosts are monitored worldwide.
A longer technical description of the project is available.

Visualize African Connectivity


This "Internet Weather"-like map shows the network performance measured from Trieste Italy to African Univer sities, 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 unreach able its dot disappears, so flickering dots indicate fragility. If all dots disappear the measurement host expe rienced an outage. Africa's network performance is over 10 years behind that of Europe and the US and falling f urther 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.

Detailed data on Internet performance via PinGER and the analysis of its trends in Africa can be found in our recent article: "Scientific Measure of Africa's Connectivity" available at http://sdu.ictp.it/pinger/Pinger-Africa.pdf We hope this information will be useful for your discussions and research aiming to increase awareness on the digital and knowledege divide world-wide.

Other PingER results

PingER provides insight into a multitude of network activity. To summarize the results, it is necessary to aggregate the measurements by region and to divided them into measurements of long-term trends and of short-term glitches

From the following long-term graph, for example, it is clear that the Internet in Africa is slower by a factor of the order 50, on the average, when compared to North American standards.



PingER data for the South

More than 100 institutions from the South are being monitored by the PingER project.

Detailed graphs are available for Africa, South Asia and Latin America.