African Internet Observatory

Today content and services are hosted externally in Europe and traffic between countries in Africa is circuitous, often boomeranging through Europe. These connectivity challenges impact the availability and cyber resilience of critical services, e.g., the fiber outage in west africa left many without power because the nation power company’s payment system was hosted externally and similarly left many businesses inoperational. Moreover, the additional latency and network jitter impacts the network’s ability to host many crucial and emerging services, e.g., live streaming, and federated learning.

The African Internet Observatory is a collective of projects aimed to shed light on the digital connectivity landscape in Africa through the generation of statistically meaningful analysis and characterization of the digital ecosystem in Africa. To this end, our goals are to deploy a large ecosystem of assessment devices, to develop statistical analysis techniques to ensure representative and context aware analysis, and to create frameworks to simulate/investigate the implications of digital intervention activities.

News

Goals

• Goal #1: 100 x 10 -- deploy 100 probes in 10 countries. Significantly doubling the measurement infrastructure in Africa (Outside of S. Africa).
• Goal #2: Assess cyber resilience of critical services (government services and utilities).
• Goal #3: Assess the ability of infrastructure to support emerging use cases (e.g., real time learning) and applications (e.g., federated learning).
• Goal #4: Quantify and characterize reliability, consistency, and privacy of end users.

Engage with us: We are actively recruiting various stake-holders.

• Network providers (IXP, ISP, MNO): We seek to develop more meaningful interfaces for IXP-manager to understand or debug peering interactions and implications. We also seek to characterize your networks. Please express your interest here.
• Volunteers: We are looking for volunteers to host our probes, and participate in our study.
• Researchers: We would like to shed-light on characteristics on African networks and connectivity. Please share your research artefacts with us via this form.

Active projects

• Analysis of Subsea cables Outage Impact (direct, indirect impact, economic impact).
• Quantification and analysis of locality in Africa (content, routing, infrastructure).
• Community network designs in Africa ( Presentation @ BIAS Workshop).
• Characterization of infrastructure capabilities in Africa (terresterial, subsea, LEO).