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The figure below shows the correlation between International bandwidth Inn Figure 12) and the normalized derived PingER throughput. It can be seen that the correlation is good (R^2 R 2
~ 0.59). It is also seen that the African countries (in Magenta) lie towards the bottom left where both the throughput and International Bandwidth are low. Libya is an anomaly since the only site monitored there is the email server for the Libya Telecommunications which should have good connectivity compared to most sites in Libya.
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There are many indicators of countries' development from organizations such as the International Telecommunications Union, the United Nations, the CIA, the World Bank try to classify countries by their development. They are quite challenging and require careful consideration of: what can be measured, how useful is it, how well it is defined, how it changes with time, how it changes from country to country, the cost of measuring, the time it takes to gather (to avoid being too out of date, how subjective they are.
Typically they are based on some combination of GDP, life expectancy, literacy, education, phone lines, Internet penetration etc. Some examples include the Human Development Index (HDI), the Digital Opportunity Index (DOI), the Opportunity Index, the Technology Achievement Index etc. In general agree with one another (R^2~0R 2 ~ 0.8). More information can be found here. For this report we focus on just two, the DOI (since it is recent and covers more countries than most) and the HDI since it different from the others and focuses on the human condition,
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The figures below shows a map of HDI by country, the correlation between the HDI and the normalized derived PingER throughput for Mediterranean and African countries, and the PingERE throughputs per African country. The correlation is seen to be strong (R^2~0R 2 ~ 0.64) in the middle figure. It is also seen that N. Africa has 10 times poorer performance than Europe, yet N. Africa is several times better than say E. Africa. E. Africa is poor, limited by its satellite access. For W. Africa there are big differences, some such as Senegal can afford SAT3 fibre while others use satellite, There is great diversity between and within regions. This is also show for the normalized derived PingER throughput for Africa in the figure to the right where one can see the overall throughput performance is poor to bad. There is a factor of 10 difference between Angola and Libya. N Africa is the best, and E Africa the worst. There are big differences within regions. In 2002, BW/capita ranged from 0.02 to over 40bps - a factor of over 1000.
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The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) from Transparency International relates to perceptions of the degree of corruption as seen by business people and country analysts, and ranges between 10 (highly clean) and 0 (highly corrupt). It covers 180 countries. See figure 8 for a map of its values for various countries in 2006. The correlation between the Normalized derived throughput and the CPI is shown below. The overall correlation of R^2~0R 2 ~ 0.55 is good, however if one looks at the correlations for a region such as Latin America, South Asia or Africa it is very poor and negative in the case of Latin America.
Routing and
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Bandwidth use
According to Mike Jensen, in 2002 there was almost no intra-African Internet connectivity and the vast majority of international bandwidth lands in the G8 countries - principally North America followed by Europe (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the UK). High intra-regional telecom prices limited the establishment of links between neighbouring countries to just 5 - Gambia-Senegal, and South Africa's links to Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana. As a result increasing amounts of intra-African traffic must be transited through high cost cross-continental links. The utilization of bandwidth in 2002 is seen in the figure below. 
Looking at the figure below of the routing from the best connected country in Sub Saharan Africa, i.e. South Africa to the rest of Africa in 2005 it is seen that aprt from to Zimbabwe and Botswana traffic was routed via other continents. Not only does this increase costs but it means that In essence the African community is subsidizing the international carriers.
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