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