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The striking number of countries in Eastern and Central Africa with minimum RTTs of >400ms is indicative that they were using GEO-Stationary (GEOS)satellite links.

Another way of illustrating which countries are using satellites is to look at a bar chart of the PingER measured minimum RTT in the fuirst half of 2009 for each country sorted by the minimum RTT. Such a chart is shown below on the left. It is seen that there is a steep rise around 400ms as one moves to GEOS satellite connections. The predominance of African countries (blue) with large minimum RTT is also apparent. If one creates the same type of bar chart but only using African countries then the result is seen on the right below where the countries with a minimum RTT > 450ms are labelled.

East Africa contains 300M people, yet less than 3% are Internet users (see Internet usage for Africa). Bandwidth in Africa is very expensive. See for example the left hand figure below where it is seen that bandwidth costs for broadband in Sub-Saharan Africa are 30-40 times that in the US. Taken together with the earnings differences, what takes say 15% of a US Gross National Income (GNI) per capita will take over 800% of a Sub-Saharan GNI per capita.

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