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the troubles with internet connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa

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  the troubles with internet connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2015-06-14 05:54 +0000
    Re: the troubles with internet connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2015-07-16 10:53 +0300

#7902 — the troubles with internet connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa

From the «also: why Facebook sucks» department:
Title: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
Author:
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2015 13:30:26 -0400
Link: https://www.facebook.com/dweekly/posts/10101729307500703

Comments[1]

Links:
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9711782 (link)


--
Posting to comp.misc, sci.misc, and misc.news.internet.discuss

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#8137

On 2015-06-14 08:54:53 +0300, RS Wood said:

> From the «also: why Facebook sucks» department:
> Title: Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks
> Author:
> Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2015 13:30:26 -0400
> Link: https://www.facebook.com/dweekly/posts/10101729307500703
> 
> Comments[1]
> 
> Links:
> [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9711782 (link)

As I live in Africa, I opened the link with trepidation, expecting 
another boring rant by Zuck imploring multnationals to help build out 
infrustructure so he can Facebookize Africa.  Not at all!  Turns out 
it's rather an issue of popular websites being hosted in America or 
Europe and those companies not having local points of presence or 
caching availability in Africa.  I learned a lot.  The response from 
Angani is here: 
https://angani.co/blog/its-not-how-much-fibre-you-have-its-what-you-do-with-it/ 
 Turns out Angani offers cloud hosting from servers in Kenya, which are 
tied into the global fiber optic network better than just about 
anywhere in Africa.  The blog post though, shows network latency in a 
diagram that appears to come from Kampala, which makes me happy, 
because for the moment, that's home for me.  The Ycombinator link has 
some insightful commentary including from a few folks working around 
here - very interesting to me.

//--clip
(Mildly technical post about Internet in emerging markets)
Kenya is one of the most wired & sophisticated economies of sub-Saharan 
Africa, with a plentiful selection of undersea fiber optic landings to 
Mombasa; indeed the country serves as the gateway for many others in 
the region, like landlocked Rwanda and Uganda.
And yet despite this, the relatively limited traffic currently coming 
from the continent means that even in Nairobi, a substantial amount of 
traffic ends up routing through London or Amsterdam, producing 
150-250ms round trip times, even to the most sophisticated companies 
with aggressively global solutions.
I'm on superb WiFi here at the airport lounge as I wait to catch my 
flight (-54dB RSSI on channel 36 to be precise). The airport appears to 
use AccessKenya as their upstream ISP. And the Internet is still pretty 
bad.
Twitter is being served from ATLANTA. Georgia. Which it might be worth 
noting is really really far away from Kenya. Like 300ms distant. HTTPS 
handshakes mean three full round trip exchanges must be completed 
before you can even begin your request to a server, so nearly a full 
second passes before your client is even starting to send its request. 
DOMContentLoaded is 2.95s, and page load only finishes at 12.85s. 
Facebook, served from London, has a 4s DOMContentLoaded.
Google.com has a more reasonable 636ms to DOMContentLoaded due to 
"cheating" using a special protocol called QUIC that's different from 
HTTPS and doesn't require any round trips to initiate communicate once 
a session has ever been established, which makes latency hurt less. 
It's clear these kinds of low-overhead protocols could have high impact 
in these markets.
Even David Ulevitch's superbly peered and colo'ed OpenDNS finds their 
anycast IP 208.67.222.222 some 200+ms away in South Africa. Traffic to 
Google Public DNS delightfully ingresses to Google's network in Mombasa 
(!) a mere 8ms away...but the anycast IP (8.8.8.8) is 150ms -- I'm 
guessing London. Network ingress != RTT sadly; at least until content 
providers push more intelligence to the edge of their networks.
Startups like Couple hosted on AWS without CloudFront require 
traversing the net to the US backbone in whichever hosting zone they 
happen to have plopped their instances. Box.net, no tiny startup 
anymore, is being served out of SAN JOSE. Half a world and 368ms away. 
So is Uber, which just launched in Nairobi. Apple Company, ever an 
Akamai Technologies flagship customer, finds itself served out of Paris 
(186ms). Have I mentioned that, as a publicly traded company, pretty 
much Akamai's *primary* job is to get as close to an end-user as 
possible? And they are still further from me at this global crossroads 
than a round trip through mid-earth orbit via O3b!
Which leads me to perhaps a mildly surprising conclusion: from an end 
user perception of speed, it only matters somewhat how sophisticated 
the Kenyan domestic backbone gets or even how many new fiber ports the 
country gets -- as long as peering is poor, content caches are distant, 
and sites require lots of round trips to build a meaningful experience 
for users. The Internet will still be slow here. And clearly if some of 
the most sophisticated startups launching products targeted to the 
local market aren't doing well at this, it's structurally hard to do. 
That sounds to me like an interesting problem.
[EDIT June 15: Angani, a Kenyan hosting provider, has posted a meaty 
followup with appeal for local content hosting at 
https://angani.co/…/its-not-how-much-fibre-you-have-its-wh…/ ]
//--clip

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