Introduction

Internet coverage and performance in the Sub Sahara region of Africa (see Figure 1, for the UN definition of the Sub-Sahara) is exceedingly poor. This is illustrated by the number of Internet connections per city worldwide seen in Figure 2 where it is seen that Africa stands out as almost lacking any (i.e. it is dark).  Figure 3 illustrates how Africa has very little submarine cable connectivity (white lines) compared to the rest of the world.

Figure 1: UN Definition of Sub-Sahara

Figure 2: World Internet Connection Density
from Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University (http://chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/index.html)

Figure 3: Submarine Cables 2007, from telegeography.com

 There are many reasons for this poor connectivity including: electricity (see Figure 5 for the light at night for the world and compare Africa with the rest of the world), import duties, skills (see Figure 6 for a cartogram (where territories are re-sized according to the subject of interest - all cartograms shown here are from http://www.worldmapper.org/) of tertiary education spending growth), disease (Figure 7), protectionist policies, corruption (see Figure 8), conflict (see Figure 9).

Figure 5: World light at night

Figure 6:

Figure 7: HIV Prevalence

Figure 8: Corruption Perception Index

Figure 9:






Another way of looking at the poor  situation in Africa is to look at Figure 4, a cartogram illustrating the lack of Internet users in Africa compared to the rest of the world.

Figure 4:

 Costs

One result and immediate cause of this is the cost of this are costs of Internet connections in Africa.  

Opportunities

Africa has close to 1 billion people or about 14% of the world's population. However, the Internet penetration shown in the table below is only about 3.6% so it is a huge potential market. However, this will introduce challenges of new business models (e.g. micro-payments, content ion many new local languages etc.).

           
      Interesting Trends:

                                                   

                                                        

                        

                     
                        

                      

                    

                   

                  

Maps of Connectivity from South Africa

An interesting way to analyze the state of internet connectivity in Africa is to look at colored maps of various metrics as seen from our monitoring node in South Africa.
    
 
       Ping Unreachability                                  Packet Loss                                           Min_rtt
 
 
Routing in Africa seen from SLAC
Using programs written to analyze traceroutes for different regions we have been able to generate topology maps of various regions in Africa as seen from SLAC. These maps provide a valuable insight into the various ASNs that are encountered as packets are routed from SLAC to Africa.
 
      
 
       SLAC to West Africa                         SLAC to South Africa                         SLAC to East Africa
 
                                                          
                                                                  SLAC to Central Africa

Initiatives

GEANT has connections to EuMed in particular Marocco, Algeria, Tunisa and Egypt, see http://www.dante.net/upload/pdf/EUMED-poster.pdf . They are now working on connecting to Ubuntunet East and Ubuntunet South.

The SAT3 fibre serves some countries of Western and Southern Africa. The EASSY fibre is intended to assist Eastern Africa.

Useful Links

ICT in Africa: a Status Report, Mike Jensen
West Africa Submarine cable Connection
Web Atlas of Regional Integration in West Africa
African Scientific Network
African Universities
Columbia University Africa Studies
The bandwidth Initiative: Opening the power of the Internet to African Universities
University of Zambia Status.