Internet connectivity in Sub-Saharan Africa
angani.co
angani.co
CloudFlare will be rolling out edge hardware in Africa this year to address the latency problem. We will also be rolling out DNS in Africa as well so that DNS queries will not need to leave the continent (or even country in many cases).
For dynamic content we will be supporting our Railgun technology to help alleviate the backhaul latency from these edge machines to origin servers.
These problems are solvable and Africa has not been forgotten (at least by us). We have many clients in Africa and, of course, many people accessing CloudFlare managed sites from African countries.
Also, latency came down to 80ms which is a huge deal. With ADSL it is sub 20ms. Of the major websites, it was only Google that was local at that point.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip... was designed to handle this exact problem.
/rant i really hate this trend. Africa is not a country, it has 54 sovereign states.
We are currently already rolled out in South Africa and will be adding PoPs in two locations in North Africa, and one each in East Africa and West Africa.
The idea is to get good latency coverage across African countries. Once we are rolled out in all those locations we'll be looking at latencies from specific countries to see where we should be adding extra PoPs. The actual locations of our PoPs depends partly on the political geography and partly on the Internet geography. Our goal is minimal latency for maximum population. For example, it might not make sense to have (hypothetical here) a PoP in Ouagadougou if the Internet connectivity to Accra is fantastic, but despite the relative proximity it might turn out that a PoP in Abuja is better than trying to serve Nigeria from Ghana. We'll monitor performance see where we should be.
See, for example, the discussion of latency change related to our Johannesburg PoP across southern Africa: https://blog.cloudflare.com/johannesburg-cloudflares-30th-da...
We've done the same in Europe. For example, we have a number of PoPs in eastern parts of Europe but not in every country.
These costs trickle down to end users. Even in "progressive" (heh) South Africa 3G can cost as much as ~$150 per GB (so called "out-of-bundle").
I was attempting to set up IMAP in Thunderbird for my parents (who are forced to use 3G due to location) - the obvious merit there is the cloud backup of their emails. To conserve bandwidth they previously had POP3 set up to download headers only. This is impossible to set up with IMAP because, according to Thunderbird HDD space is more expensive than bandwidth and hence re-downloads items if you choose to have headers only. This is a well-known piece of software.
Keep the high costs of poor little Africa in mind when designing your software. Many of us are lucky enough to have access to "high-speed" 10Mbps uncapped copper but there are significant amounts of people who are outright extorted by the cellphone networks.
Please design your software to be kind with bandwidth. Latency isn't the only issue and, in fact, of all the people I know only gamers care about latency (because we have the bigger bandwidth/speed problem to deal with). The average African is quite happy to wait 1s for a website to load, they aren't happy if that page costs them $1 to load.
Mobile data in South Africa is actually pretty cheap in absolute terms, though of course it's still extremely expensive compared to average income.
[1] http://www.vodacom.co.za/vodacom/shopping/data/prepaid-data
USD(Out Of Bundle Rates Per MB) * 1024MB = USD(2) * 1024MB = $164 ~ $150
You would have to really cherry pick the worst case possible scenario to be paying R1 per GB and even then R1024 is $82.44.
Contracts come with data included, all the networks have data bundles, most of them run frequent 2-for-1 style promotion deals and you could always shop around.
Once you factor in all of that, mobile bandwidth is pretty on par with most of the world. Really expensive when you take into account people's incomes, though.
ADSL and other fixed line / point-to-point options are much cheaper once you require anything more than a tiny amount of data, but still really expensive considering the typical South African's income.
Things are very different from the first world, but you have to factor in physics too - we're at the opposite end of the world of just about anything you would want to connect to (latency!), our neighbours didn't all have connections already set up that we could just piggy-back off, etc.
It all got a LOT better in recent years.
This is a tricky problem but there's a solution for it: edns-client-subnet, which allows the DNS provider to pass along your subnet for services which don't return the same response for everyone:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-edns-client-sub...
Google's Public DNS team announced that support had been enabled for Akamai last December:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/12/google-pu...
The difference in user experience between HTML apps that don't even _try_ to cache anything locally vs mobile apps that sync in the background and cache things locally is night and day and it just gets bigger and bigger as your bandwidth quality gets worse.
This is the biggest reason why I'm concerned for the future of the open web.
Not all content providers will be able to run the infrastructure that Google does, which is why it makes sense for cloud service providers to do the same.