Analysing Africa’s City-to-City Latency

Session description:

Our previous study on Internet delays in Africa revealed latency clusters, where some countries have developed faster interconnectivity among themselves. While the clusters generally formed within regional demarcations, there were also some counter-intuitive scenarios where clusters formed between countries that are geographically distant, and where in some cases, neighbouring countries could not cluster together. This revealed the prevalence of circuitous routing between neighbouring countries, resulting from the lack of interconnection and peering, either nationally or regionally. This paper intends to further analyse latencies between major cities in Africa. In this regard, the paper will analyse path cost metrics, including round-trip-times (RTT), number of hops, and the geographical locations of hops, ie whether or not there is any circuitous routing. The final analysis will include a latency matrix and geographical visualization of latencies based on data collected since October 2017.

Target audience:

IT Professionals

Presented by:

Josiah Chavula

Prerequisites:

None