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Figure shows the Min RTT and packet loss to Latin American countries from SLAC. Mexico seems to have the least RTT and acceptable loss due to its direct connectivity with the US. Argentina, Brazil and Chile are also performing reasonably well. Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay are catching up. However Cuba is still stuck to satellite and the performance is dreadful.
Comparisons with "Development" Indices
The size of the Internet infrastructure is a good indication of a country's progress to an information based economy. However measuring the number of users is not easy in developing countries because many people share accounts, use corporate and academic networks, or visit the rapidly growing number of cyber cafés, telecentres and business services. Furthermore, the number of users does not take into account the extent of use, from those who just write a couple of emails a week, to people who spend many hours a day on the net browsing, transacting, streaming, or downloading. New measures of Internet activity are needed to take these factors into account. Most of the Internet traffic in a developing country is international (75-90%). We measure international Internet performance which is an interesting (good?) indicator. To see how well this correlates with "development" indices we scatter plot the Mathis derived throughput from PingER against various development indices. If it correlates well then we may be able to make much quicker snap-shots of a country's/regions performance without subjective biases.
There are many "development" indices today:
- UNDP Human Development Index (2006, 177 countries)
- UNDP Technology Achievement Index (2001, 72 countries)
- ITU Digital Access Index (2003) and the Digital Opportunity Index (2006), both 180 countries
- World Economic Forum's Network Readiness Index (2004, 2005, 2006-2007: 122 countries)
- Harvard University Network Readiness Index (2002, 75 countries)
Typically these indices use some combination of GDP/capita, knowledge (e.g. tertiary education enrolloment), life expectancy, network (hosts/capita, access, policy, usage, affordability, users/capita); technology (patents, royalties, exports, phones/capita)
In the scatter plots below of the derived throughputs vs. the "development" index, the US, Canada and Mexico are typically excluded since the distance from the measuring point (the US) RTT is small so the derived throughput from the Mathis formula will be artificially high. Hosts in well connected countries such as Finland, Sweden, Japan also have their losses poorly measureed since only 14,400 packets are sent to a host in a month, so measuring losses of < .01% is inaccurate.
Comparison of TCP Throughput with UNDP Human Development Index
Graph Goes here
The UNDP Human Development Index (HDI) is composed of 3 factors defining the development of a country. They are:
- A Long and healthy life, as measured by expectancy at birth.
- Knowledge, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with 2/3 weight) and the combined primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment ratios (with 1/3 weight).
- A decent standard of living, as measured by GDP per capita.
On the scatter plot the S. Asian countries are indicated by orange diamonds.
The figure above shows a scatter plot of the HDI versus the PingER Derived Throughput for July 2006. Each point is colored according to the country's region. A logarithmic fit is also shown. Logarithmic is probably appropriate since Internet performance is increasing exponentially in time and the differences between the countries can be related to number of years they are behind the developing countries, while human development is more linear. Since the PingER Derived TCP Throughput is linearly proportional to RTT, countries close to the U.S. (i.e. the U.S., Canada and Central America) may be expected to have elevated throughputs compared to their HDI. We thus do not plot or use these countries in the correlation fit between HDI and throughput. It is seen that there is a strong correlation (R2 > 0.6) between the HDI and throughput. As expected countries in Africa generally occupy the lower values in x and y, and European countries together with Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Japan occupy the higher values of x and y.
Comparison of TCP Throughput with Technology Access Index
In 2001 the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) introduced the Technology Achievement Index(TAI) with 72 countries to reflect a country's capacity to participate in the technological innovations of the network age. The TAI aims to capture how well a country is creating and diffusing technology and building a human skill base. It includes the following dimensions: Creation of technology (e.g. patents, royalty receipts); diffusion of recent innovations (Internet hosts/capita, high & medium tech exports as share of all exports); Diffusion of old innovations (log phones/capita, log of electric consumption/capita); Human skills (mean years of schooling, gross enrollment in tertiary level in science, math & engineering). the Figure below shows December 2003's derived throughput measured from the U.S. vs. the TAI. The correlation is seen to be positive and medium to good.
Graph goes over here
Comparison of TCP Throughput with Digital Access Index
In 2003, the ITU's Market, Economics and Finance Unit launched the Digital Access Index (DAI), a new index, which measures the overall ability of individuals in a country to access and use new ICTs. The DAI is built around four fundamental vectors that impact a country's ability to access ICTs: infrastructure, affordability, knowledge and quality and actual usage of ICTs. The DAI has been calculated for ~180 economies where European countries were among the highest ranked. The DAI allows countries to see how they compare to peers and their relative strengths and weaknesses. The DAI also provides a transparent and globally measurable way of tracking progress towards improving access to ICTs." from http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/dai/
. In 2005 the ITU launched the Digital Opportunity Index(DOI) The DoI evaluates the opportunity, infrastructure and utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for 180 economies worldwide. The Index monitors the mobile communications that promise to bridge the digital divide in many parts of the world, as well as more recent technologies such as broadband and mobile Internet access.The right hand map above shows the DOI coverage and values worldwide.