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Before we start to compare L. America to the rest of the world it is useful to look at a World Map of Internet Users. This shows that for most the developed world (US and Canada, W. Europe, Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea) typically 40% or more of the people have Internet connectivity while for S. Asia it is less than 15%Latin America and the Caribbean that contains about 8% of the world's population, the penetration is about 17%, i.e. typically a factor of 2-3 less.
From SLAC: 1. Packet Loss, 2. Min RTT to World Regions, 3. Unreachability, 4. Jitter
The left hand figure shows the packet loss to various regions of the world as seen from N. America. Since losses are fairly distance independent no attempt has been made to normalize the data. For typical bursty Internet loss patterns, losses of >1% will result in annoying interactive VoIP and video conferencing. It is seen that the world divides up into two major super-regions: N. America, Europe, E. Asia and Oceania with losses below 0.1%, and Latin America, C. Asia, Russia, S.E. Asia, S. Asia and Africa with losses > 0.1% and as high as as a few per-cent. All countries are improving exponentially, but Africa is falling further behind most regions.
The left middle figure shows the drop in the Minimum RTT from 2002-2006MinimumRTTs of > 400ms result in poor real-time interactivity. 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.
The right middle graph shows the unreachability of world regions seen from the US. A host is deemed unreachable if all pings of a set fail to respond. It shows the fragility of the links and is mainly distance independent (the reasons for fragility are usually in the last mile, the end site or host). Again the developed regions US and Canada, E. Asia, and Oceania have the lowest unreachability (< 0.3%) whil while the other regions have unreachability from 0.7% to 2%, and again Africa is not improving, with Latin America having the fourth worst unreachability (after Africa, S. Asia having the second worst unreachabilityand the Middle East).
The right hand graph shows the jitter or variability of world regions seen from the US. The jitter is defined as the Inter Quartile Range (IQR) of the Inter Packet Delay Variability (IPDV i = RTT i - RTT i-1) . The Jitter is relatively distance independent, it measures congestion, and has little impact on the Web and email. It decides the length of VoIP codec buffers and impacts streaming. For real-time multimedia (H.323) Performance Measurement and Analysis of H.323 Traffic gives for one way: jitter = 0-20ms = Good, jitter = 20-50ms = acceptable, > 50ms = poor. We measure round-trip jitter which is roughly two times the one way jitter. We see the usual division into dveloped verus developed versus developing regions.
MOS for various regions
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