IEEE Spectrum February, 2013 - 56

Cairo
Cairo
Cairo
Cairo

Chad
Chad
Chad
Chad

Nowhere is this disparity felt
Eritrea
Eritrea
Eritrea
Eritrea
greater than in Africa. Less than
Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Uganda
Uganda
Uganda
Uganda
16 percent of Africans have acDakar
Dakar
Dakar
Dakar
cess to the Internet, according
to the latest market research.
Compare that with 63 percent
Lagos
Lagos
Lagos
Lagos
Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau
of Europeans and 79 percent of
Guinea
Guinea
Guinea
Guinea
North Americans. Even in Asia,
Sierra
Sierra
Leone
Leone
Sierra
Leone
Sierra
Leone
Liberia
Liberia
where Internet usage ranks secLiberia
Liberia
Kenya
Kenya
Kenya
Kenya
ond to last among the seven
Rwanda
Rwanda
Rwanda
Rwanda
Burundi
Burundi
major world regions, the peneBurundi
Burundi
Nigeria
Nigeria
Nigeria
Nigeria
Tanzania
TanzaniaSeychelles
Tanzania
Tanzania
tration rate is almost twice the
Seychelles
Seychelles
rate in Africa.
Democratic
Democratic
Republic
Republic
Part of the problem is poor
Democratic
Republic
Democratic
Republic
Congo
of Congo
ofofof
Congo
Congo
network performance. The
total bandwidth available to
2008
2008
2008
2008
shuttle data between African
Madagascar
Madagascar
Madagascar
Madagascar
countries and the rest of the
Zambia
Zambia
Zambia
Zambia
Malawi
Malawi
Malawi
Malawi
world in 2011 was less than
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe
1 terabit per second. That's
Botswana
Botswana
Botswana
Botswana
about one-seventieth of
Melkbosstrand
Melkbosstrand
Melkbosstrand
Melkbosstrand
Europe's international bandwidth capacity. Making matters
worse, the price for bandwidth
in Africa is cripplingly high.
While a university in Germany
might pay about US $4000 per
month for 1 gigabit per second
of bandwidth, a school in Kenya
can expect to pay $200 000 for
the same service.
Yet while Africans continue
to face huge technological disadvantages, conditions have
nonetheless improved dramatically over the past few years.
Since 2009, Africa has seen
unprecedented upgrades to
its broadband infrastructure.
Remarkably, one of the biggest
drivers was a single popular event: the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The celebrated To answer these questions, we need a cheap, reliable
tournament attracted more than 3 million football fans to Johannesburg that way to measure Internet performance at various places
year. It also brought television crews and newscasters, whose telecommuni- throughout Africa. And we need to compare the results
cations needs greatly exceeded what South Africa could have provided just with data from other regions and track changes over time.
two years before.
That's exactly what the Ping End-to-end Reporting,
In 2008, Africa had only three fiber-optic links to the global Internet: two
or PingER, project does. I lead the project at the SLAC
in the north and one in the west. But by the first match of the World Cup in
National Accelerator Laboratory, in California, with
June 2011, two additional international subsea cables had made landings up
help from a handful of students and colleagues at the
and down Africa's eastern and western shorelines, and three more would be
National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in
completed before the end of the year. Since then, telecoms, governments, and
Pakistan and at the International Centre for Theoretical
aid organizations have invested billions in additional submarine cables and
Physics (ICTP) in Italy. But PingER's reach is truly global.
terrestrial networks across the continent.
Using the simple and common "ping" test, we reguSo has Internet availability improved in landlocked as well as coastal coun- larly measure how well data is flowing, if at all, between
tries? Or is it merely falling behind at a slower rate than before? Where besides
pairs of hosts-typically Web servers at distant univerthe University of Kinshasa are there still significant bandwidth bottlenecks?
sities. Since PingER's start nearly two decades ago, we

Football and Broadband

The telecommunications needs of the 2010 FIFA
World Cup in South Africa helped bring a plethora
of new international subsea cables to sub-Saharan
Africa. As data from the PingER project show, the
additional capacity has allowed many countries to
upgrade from satellite to terrestrial links.

feb 2013

North AmericAN

SPectrUm.ieee.orG

opening illustration by

Dan Page

http://SPectrUm.ieee.orG

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum February, 2013