State of Internet Measurement in Africa - A Survey

This paper presents the results of a survey aimed at understanding the status of Internet measurement platforms usage, deployment and capabilities in Africa. It presents findings related to prevalence of measurement in the region, the reasons why the different business categories investigated conduct Internet measurement as well as the metrics of interest to these entities. The survey also looked at the popular measurement platforms that the respondents use in their measurement activities as well as the platforms that are hosted by businesses and users in the African region. The survey also recorded responses related to data handling and privacy considerations. A total of 123 responses were received from 34 countries. The survey revealed that Internet measurements are not widely conducted in the region largely due to the inadequacy of deployed measurement platforms, the lack of awareness in the subject, and the lack of relevant skills to carry out the measurement tasks. We outlined some recommendations to remedy these issues

A survey of anti-spam mechanisms and their usage from a Regional Internet Registry's perspective

This paper specifically deals with the different policies and technical frameworks at a Regional Internet Registry (RIR) level in terms of anti-spam measures. It also exposes the issue of spam from an Internet registry perspective, as an important element of the Internet technical infrastructure. We found out that, an RIR itself is not mandated to fight spam but it maintains a registry that is of paramount importance for traceability of Internet Number Resources ownership information. The paper starts with describing the challenges faced by operators followed by the different sources of spam. It then exposes the different mechanisms deployed by RIRs but importantly, this paper shows how those mechanisms either technical or policy-oriented are mostly underutilised, although they are operational. The latter is achieved by taking AFRINIC, the African RIR as case study

DNS Lame delegations: A case-study of public reverse DNS records in the African Region

The DNS, as one of the oldest components of the modern Internet, has been studied multiple times. It is a known fact that operational issues such as mis-configured name servers affect the responsiveness of the DNS service which could lead to delayed responses or failed queries. One of such misconfigurations is lame delegation and this article explains how it can be detected and also provides guidance to the African Internet community as to whether a policy lame reverse DNS should be enforced. It also gives an overview of the degree of lameness of the AFRINIC reverse domains where it was found that 45% of all reverse domains are lame

Performance barriers to cloud services in Africa's public sector: A latency perspective

Cloud computing allows individuals and organizations to lease storage and computation resources remotely and as needed. For such remote access to work efficiently, there is a need for reliable and low-delay delivery of Internet traffic. By carrying out a month-long Internet measurement campaign, this paper investigates location and latencies of cloud-based web hosting in the public sector of five African countries. Results of the study show that a large percentage of public sector websites are hosted in cloud-based infrastructure physically located in America and Europe. Analysis of latencies shows significant differences between local and remote hosted websites, and that delays are significantly lower for countries that host CDN nodes. The results also indicate high delays for local websites that are accessed circuitousl

TownshipNet: A Localized Hybrid TVWS-WiFi and Cloud Services Network

This paper describes a network architecture to provide low cost last mile access and cloud services for local content sharing in a poorly resourced township environment. We describe how ICT solutions are developed in close partnership with the local community who will benefit from the interventions. We analyze the data usage patterns of mobile users in the township to provide us with a real understanding of the needs of the community. This data usage analysis is used to inform the design of the network and of the localized cloudlet services. The network consists of hybrid TV White Space and WiFi backhaul and WiFi public access points

Characterisation of Mobile Data Usage in Township Communities

The paper describes a measurement study of mobile Internet usage in township communities in South Africa. The idea is to understand usage pattern of mobile data that would motivate the provisioning of a localised cloudlet infrastructure with an appropriate set of services

Internet development in Africa: a content use, hosting and distribution perspective

Although a considerable investment in broadband infrastructure has improved broadband speeds across many African countries, the reliability and performance that users ultimately receive is determined also by the interconnection between networks and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and by where the content, services and applications are hosted. Often, high latencies to remote destinations introduce significant performance bottlenecks, suggesting that, in addition to investments in higher throughput links, effort should be devoted to improving interconnection between ISPs and locating content closer to the users. By untangling the complexity of content access, use, hosting and distribution in Africa, this study offers three main contributions. First, it discusses challenges related to usage, hosting, distribution of local content and services in Africa, by developing a case on African local news websites. Second, it makes publicly available measurement data and indicators for local content use, hosting, and distribution across all African countries. And third, it provides points of policy recommendations on how to improve internet access and use and infrastructure performance from a content perspective

INethi Community Network: A First Look at Local and Internet Traffic Usage

This poster presents iNethi, a community wireless network deployed in a peri-urban township of Cape Town, South Africa. Initial usage clearly indicates a demand for Internet-based external services and, to a lesser extent, local services. We focus on the initial months of our deployment, and interaction with locally installed INethi services, as well as the impact of access to the Internet. We present data from our traffic logs, captured during a period of six months. We observed that a large proportion of data is being consumed by software or antivirus updates. The data collected and trends observed will allow iNethi operators to make necessary adjustment to the networks

Insight Into Africa’s Country-level Latencies

This paper provides insight into the effects of cross-border infrastructure and logical interconnections in Africa on both intra-country and cross-border latency on end-to-end Internet paths, by comparing Internet performance measurements between different countries. We collected ICMPpings between countries using Speedchecker and applied a community detection algorithm to group countries based on round trip times (RTTs) between countries. We observed three main latency clusters: East and Southern Africa; North Africa; and West and Central Africa. An interesting observation is that these clusters largely correspond to countries that share the same official languages or past colonial history. The cluster in Eastern and Southern Africa is the most strongly clustered: these countries have the lowest inter-country latency values. We also found that some countries have a much higher intra-country latency than expected, pointing to the lack of local peering or physical infrastructure within the country itself. This finding underscores the importance of physical networking infrastructure deployment and inter-network relationships at country and regional leve

A First Look At Mobile Internet Use in Township Communities in South Africa

This paper presents a study of mobile data usage in South African townships. In contrast to previous studies, which have studied mobile data usage in developing regions (including South Africa), we focus our study on two townships in South Africa; the extremely resource-constrained nature of townships sheds light, for the first time, on how people in these communities use mobile data. We perform a mixed-methods study, combining quantitative network measurements of mobile app usage with qualitative survey data to gain insights about mobile data usage patterns and the underlying reasons for user behavior concerning mobile data usage. Due to the limited availability of public free Wi-Fi and despite the relatively high cost of mobile data, we find that a typical township user's median mobile data usage is significantly more than Wi-Fi usage. As expected, and consistent with observations of mobile data usage in parts of South Africa with better resources, users tend to favor using Wi-Fi for streaming video applications, such as YouTube. Interestingly, however, unlike users in less resource-constrained settings, township users also consume significant mobile data to update mobile applications, as opposed to relying on Wi-Fi networks for application updates. These behaviors suggest that network and mobile application designers must pay more attention to data usage patterns on cellular networks to provide mobile network architectures that provide more cost-effective mechanisms for tasks such as application update