Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

Re:Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks by sitharus on Saturday June 13, 2015 @03:13PM (#9712222)

250ms to Facebook and that 'sucks', glad to see New Zealand's opinion on our internet connectivity is validated!

I routinely see 270-300ms pings to facebook. Anything on Amazon's CDN is at 150ms that as is CloudFlare. Akamai does have local nodes, as does Google but the lack of competition on the cable makes it slow.

Guess I should move to Kenya?

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Re:Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks by viraptor on Saturday June 13, 2015 @04:09PM (#9712451)

Same for Australia. (at least outside of state capitals) It's surprising how quickly you can get used to facts like github actually timing out on ssh connection...

I really hope that something like ppsp / swarm / ipfs gets integrated into browsers. I'm pretty sure almost every non-user-content file I download every day has been downloaded somewhere in my town. I shouldn't have to go all the way to the US to get it.

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Re:Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks by afarrell on Saturday June 13, 2015 @06:18PM (#9712919)

https://mosh.mit.edu/ may be of use to you as an alternative to ssh

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Re:Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks by hrrsn on Sunday June 14, 2015 @02:10AM (#9713901)

I don't think you're being completely fair. We have excellent infrastructure, especially compared to Australia. Cloudflare now has NZ caches (and they peer locally) so HN is 3-5ms for me. Facebook has strange routing which seems to go via Auckland -> Australia -> California -> North Carolina rather than directly to the USA, which explains the added latency.

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Re:Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks by WildUtah on Saturday June 13, 2015 @09:22PM (#9713450)

HTTP 2.0 is going to be great for you Kiwis.

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Re:Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks by sitharus on Sunday June 14, 2015 @01:00AM (#9713764)

It is, so is QUIC. My employer hosts in the US but serves to NZ so I've been experimenting with new protocols to improve performance, it's always interesting.

Still won't shake the pain that is a single connection to the rest of the world (the AU links are only used for local traffic).

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Re:Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks by kukkukb on Sunday June 14, 2015 @01:42AM (#9713846)

I'm in Johannesburg, and my ping to facebook.com is 310ms. The thing is everyone seems to be used to the lag, so there isn't any complaints.

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Re:Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks by manarth on Sunday June 14, 2015 @08:31AM (#9714658)

For comparison (Bristol, UK)…

10ms to hacker-news… 130ms to facebook. But only 12ms to a facebook CDN: scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net 10ms to twitter. 13ms to BBC.

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Re:Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks by cldellow on Saturday June 13, 2015 @04:01PM (#9712415)

Amazon does have POPs in Australia, but they cost more so many companies choose not to use them.

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Re:Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks by sitharus on Saturday June 13, 2015 @05:37PM (#9712774)

Yep, that's why they're only 150ms a lot of the time. CloudFront has a few AU pops, no NZ ones though.

The Singapore and Japan zones help, but most still goes to the US.

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