Investigating Technical barriers to Cloud services in Africa
OCN/RANITP Joint Regional Summit2017, Nairobi Kenya
Josiah ChavulaAFRINIC
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Aim
Measuring Quality of Connectivity and Bandwidth in Africa’s public sector2
What we know: Country-level Latencies
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Africa~78ms
North America~45ms
Europe~30ms
Avg in-country
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Africa Latency Clusters
Cloud Computing Research
What are the characteristics of Internet connectivity between public sector public service access points (SAPs) and content servers?
– Topological distances between the public sector SAPs and public sector IT server infrastructure?
– Topological distances between the public sector SAPs and the various cloud providers?
– Bandwidth and quality of service
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Africa IXPs
Measurement Platforms
● ~230 RIPE Atlas probes in Africa○ 36 African countries○ Almost no probes in public
sector networks 6
● Web-based bandwidth tests○ Ookla speedtest.net
Data Collection
• Ping from each vantage point:– return the delay (RTT) to a selected Internet target
• Traceroute from each vantage point:– for each router hop
• determine the networks that carry traffic between source and destination
• Compute geolocation of each network hop
• Bandwidth Test from each vantage point:– determine available bandwidth from end hosts
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Preliminary Study/Results
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Public Sector Targets
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42African
countries
Distribution of web hosting providers
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Distribution of web hosting providers
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Latencies to public sector websites: Kenya
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Latencies to public sector websites: Ghana
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Take-aways
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Low latency access to
locally hosted websites, but only if traffic is not routed
remotely
Latencies in Africa
still much higher
High usage of remote web-
hosting providers (Cloud)
Africa’s Interdomain communications highly reliant
on inter-continental transit
THANK YOU!Questions?
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www.afrinic.net@JosiahChavula