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The large step for S. Asia in 2003 was due to the change over from satellite to fibre. as the result of gradual shift from Satellite to fiber. Central Asia (also Afghanistan) has hardly moved in its minimum RTT since it continues to use geostationary satellites. Africaand S. E. Asia are improving. Central Asia on the other hand has been stuck with geo-stationary satellites and so little change is seen for it. Latin America took a huge step down in RTT at the end of 1999 going from mainly satellite (>500ms) to 200ms (i.e. mainly landlines). S.E. Asia looks like a gradual improvement. For most of the other regions the improvements are marginal.
South Asia as seen from US and Europe
Figure 3 shows time series of the daily averaged derived TCP throughputs (in kbits/s) to S. Asia from SLAC. It can be seen that there are large fluctuations. These fluctuations are a characteristic of congested lines (typically the last mile). At weekends when people are not at work, there is less congestion and better throughput. It is also seen that the countries divide into two. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives have better throughput 400-1200 kbits/s compared to Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan with between 75 and 400 kbits/s.