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The ATICS survey of 84 leading tertiary institutions in Africa found 850,000 students and staff with access to a total of only 100Mbps international bandwidth. By contrast, Australia's tertiary community of 250,000 share 6Gbps of international bandwidth (although even this is still insufficient to meet their needs).

Costs

Wiki MarkupOne result and immediate cause of this is the cost of Internet connections in Africa and how they relate to income (Compare Figure 14a and 14b) and affordability.    For example "Currently \ [2007\] prices on SAT-3 are up to US$15,000 / Mbps/month, while it is estimated to cost the consortium only about US$300/Mbps/month". From a posting by Dewayne Hendricks on Dave Farber's Iper list \ -\- Bill St Arnaud. Figure 14c (from Mike Jensen) shows the GDP per capita in 2006.

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Despite the general trend toward population ageing, countries that still have relatively high fertility will have a younger population than the rest by 2050. Mostly least developed countries are in this group. In 2050, the youngest populations will be found in 11 least developed countries whose median ages are projected to be at or below 23 years. These countries include Angola, Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger and Uganda. Today, the median age in Mali, Niger and Uganda is16 years or less, making their populations the youngest in the planet. 

Wiki MarkupFrom "World Population Prospects, The 2004 Revision" UN available at: \ [http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WPP2004/2004Highlights_finalrevised.pdf\| [
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WPP2004/2004Highlights_finalrevised.pdf]\]

 This is illustrated in the map in figure 15b where the data is from the UN "World Population Prospects, The 2004 Revision".

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Worldwide Comparison

MOS for various Regions

 Information on Calculation MOS can be found at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-mon/tutorial.html#mos 

TCP throughput from CERN & SLAC to World Regions 

PingER Metrics for Africa

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Some Examples of the Impact 

In 2006, the ATICS survey of 84 leading tertiary institutions in Africa found 850,000 students and staff with access to a total of only 100Mbps international bandwidth. By contrast, Australia's tertiary community of 250,000 share 6Gbps of international bandwidth (although even this is still insufficient to meet their needs).

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Possible Remedies 

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• Very recent data for Ghana i.e. (Sep and Oct 2006) inidcates a shift from satellite to fiber. In particular if we examine the individual hosts we monitor in Ghana, one of the hosts shows a step change from 680+ ms to 260+ms, while the other still continues to show satellite indicating that part of the coutry may be shifting to fibre. Further more when we looked up the asn on both the hosts, the asn for host performing poorly was described as INTELSAT while the host which is now performing better had an ASN description of "UNSPECIFIED, NETWORK COMPUTER SYSTEMS, ACCRA GHANA".

• There was a step change in the min RTT of Eritrea from 625 ms to 700 ms approx. in Sep, 2004.

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