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- Recognize cannot fix all ills for all people over night.
- Identify where to focus on and invest effort. One good area is educating the teachers & students so they can teach others etc, so Education & Research is often a leader.
- Choose a champion application (e.g. education, science, telemedicine, video conferencing, distance learning)
- Find energetic leaders from a country/region to lead the mission forward. Illustrate the way and the gains.
- Engage policy makers for science, IT, research, technology to raise awareness, help them understand the needs, identify the gains for the country (increased productivity in Information Age), and for them to provide encouragement for IT and networking, e.g. by addressing funding, taxation, regulation, competition, education/skills, improved infrastructure (e.g. power), digital literacy, Internet adoption, create incentives, reward effort?
- Collaborate between institutions in a region (e.g. create consortium), between leading disciplines, between countries (e.g. for Internet Exchange Points) etc. to increase influence, show leadership, negotiating, collective bargaining etc.
- Partner with vendors (e.g. of equipment, fibre, Internet) to lead the way, showcase leadership, start market penetration, create demand. It's a long term investment in the future both for the company and the country.
- Get support from collaborators in other countries, from organizations (e.g. IHY, ICTP, ICFA, HEP, Physical Societies...) and possible sources of funding (NSF, GEANT, EU, World Bank, Microsoft foundation ?).
- Utilize measurements to quantify, explain and support case (e.g. ITU, UNDP, PingER, World Bank, CIA ...) and to see the effects of improvements.
- Recognize the needs for new business/development models such asmodels appropriate for Africa.
Conclusions
- Poor performance affects data transfer, multi-media, VoIP, IT development & country performance / development
- DD exists between regions, within regions, within countries, rural vs cities, between age groups?
- Decreasing use of satellites, expensive, but still needed for many remote countries in Africa and C. Asia
- Last mile problems, and network fragility
- International Exchange Points (IXPs) needed
- Internet performance (non subjective, relatively easy/quick to measure) correlate strongly with economic/technical/development indices
- Increase coverage of monitoring to understand Internet performance and validate improvements
- Africa worst by all measures (throughput, loss, jitter, DOI, international bandwidth, users, costs ?) and falling further behind.
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