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I'm in Africa and... I'm sorry, but we have nameservers already. That's not really a problem. Are you really talking about DNS servers here? I wasn't sure. The

by RyanZAG 11y ago

I'm in Africa and... I'm sorry, but we have nameservers already. That's not really a problem. Are you really talking about DNS servers here? I wasn't sure. The issues which prevent those spikes you'd like to see on the maps at Google are education (primarily literacy, especially English literacy), access to devices, and culture. Access to devices is being solved by cheap smartphones becoming obtainable to some degree and constant improvements to data networks in African countries, but the other two have no easy solution. EDIT: To maybe make it a bit easier - consider someone in a village (with a cellphone and access to a data network) who wants to find out why something happened to the carrot he was growing at home. All of us would pop open Google and search about some information about carrots. A guy in a village would head up the road to talk to his friend who's been farming for 50 years and knows about carrots. If you tried to tell him "hey, you could ask Google that question" the only reply you'd get would be "I don't really know about that". I've had someone come to me to ask me to look up bus fares on the internet for them. They'd hand me a piece of paper with the URL for the bus companies tariff page. Not too interesting until that same person later pulled out his Windows Phone smartphone to make a phone call, and he had full internet access and a good mobile browser on that phone.

noobermin 11y ago
I'm not sure how related this is, but my parents are from a Pacific island, Palau (I've mentioned it before in other comment threads). One of the things that hurts progress in my country isn't really a lack of education as much as it is ignorance in the strict sense. It's funny, because a couple of years ago, a trans-Pacific cable was laid close to the island, but the decision was made to not invest in tapping into it due to the cost--even nowadays, people are interested in improving connections, but it isn't a priority. They really haven't experienced the internet, at least not in it's full capacity, so they don't know what they are missing. They know about it from what they see on T.V. ("viral" review shows targeted at baby-boomers who still watch T.V., I suppose) and social networking, so simply, they don't know what they're missing. I recall when I finish high school and moved back here to the US for college--I basically missed the dotcom-boom days of the late 90's and early to mid 2000's, the internet was not just a convenience, it completely changed my living habits. But the so-called "other three billion" really can't know this because they haven't experienced this, so not only do you face real obstacles, but you face lethargy as well. At least for Palau, I feel like that is one of the main reasons internet access is pretty subpar there today. [*] I do admit that this might not be relevant in parts of Africa. For one, Palau is a pretty small place (no more than twenty-thousand people), so attitudes are probably much more homogeneous (with that attitude towards the urgency of improving internet infrastructure) compared to hosts of nations with millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.
karmazeroed 11y ago
Yes, the issues are substantially bigger. South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities, never mind elsewhere. People living there tell me it's not a problem. If they're not bothered by that, I doubt they give a damn about google searches. If memory serves me correctly that's been going on for about 10 years now.
- hstrauss 11y ago
  South African here. There's the electricity issue (we call the rolling blackouts "load-shedding") which affects the cellular base-stations and telco exchanges as much as anything, but also another more obvious issue for content delivery: the local loop. For the past 15+ years (as long as I've had Internet access), the incumbent telco (TelkomSA) has not been forthcoming with upgrading or maintaining the ADSL infrastructure. Finally, there seems to be traction with FTTx providers, but this seems limited to affluent pockets of a few thousand people in the country. All the new fibre offerings serve the same locations. While it's hopeful this will improve the situation in the medium-term, the backhaul from ISP to eyeball is oversubscribed at least 30:1 for ADSL, with equipment being replaced by (IMO) inferior network equipment. Additionally, there are reports of automated line-conditioning software which should improve local loop connectivity, but I've seen DSL sync issues only since the software has been implemented. The (ex-public, privatised under Telkom) Exchanges have been neglected and have recently been divided into three groups: Earners, Maintainers and "Lost Causes". The latter two will not receive upgrades from ADSL1 and the Earners will likely migrate to newer technologies. This is largely due to copper-theft and vandalism of exchanges/cellular base-stations (which are oversubscribed enough that wireless technologies routinely sustain 3000-20000ms latencies). The oligopoly running cellular networks have no incentive to improve this, since the Regulatory Authorities don't really seem to push competition as well as we'd like. TL;DR: There are issues, but rose-tinted glasses make me hopeful in the medium term. Claims are that wireless will fix everything seem bleak, since base stations become oversubscribed faster than they can be built/upgraded (and the backhaul from them is measured in megabits/s, rather than gigabits/s charged at ~US$0.15/MB).
  - nroets 11y ago
    I also live in South Africa. Our mobile networks are in pretty good shape: * Anyone can buy a prepaid SIM from any supermarket and access the Internet within 10 or 20 minutes. Last time I visited France, it took me 4 days to achieve a similar result. * Mobile data is cheap when buying in bulk. I pay USD2 per gigabyte. * LTE coverage is growing fast and RTT is good. For example my ping time to google.com is 30ms. Conclusion: Private ownership and free markets lead to good service and low cost. ESKOM proves that state ownership of companies and monopolies lead to bad service at high cost.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
> consider someone in a village (with a cellphone and access to a data network) who wants to find out why something happened to the carrot he was growing at home. All of us would pop open Google and search about some information about carrots. A guy in a village would head up the road to talk to his friend who's been farming for 50 years and knows about carrots Speaking as a US native, the reason we'd look for carrot information on the internet is that none of us know anybody with carrot experience. If I knew someone who knew about carrots, they'd see all of my carrot questions before I ever asked the internet.
- jaredhansen 11y ago
  Yes, but this is the central advantage of distributed information: while your carrot-farmer buddy is a higher-bandwidth and possibly deeper source of carrot information than google is, that guy doesn't know so much about goat husbandry. Or fishing. Or roof construction, or car repair, etc. So if carrot info is all you ever need, great -- but otherwise, you are going to need nearby buddies who are experts in many, many other things. In fact, you're going to need far more buddies than you can ever actually have, due to the limits of the number of social connections any of us can have (not to mention the limits that time itself imposes on the conversations we'd have to have in order to maintain those relationships even if we could keep them all straight in our heads). Google's primary utility isn't in making you a perfect expert on anything in particular -- it's that it allows you to become sufficiently expert at anything at all in a really short period of time. Even an army of friends, with the most varied experience you can imagine, cannot come close to matching the breadth of expertise available via the net.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    I plan to live out my whole life knowing nothing about carrot farming, goat husbandry, fishing, roof construction, or car repair. What's going on here is that Africa isn't really reaping the benefits of specialization of labor in the way the civilized world is. The guy in the example isn't even growing multiple carrots! When I get a problem with my roof, I'm not going to try to fix it myself after a crash course in Google-based roof repair. I'm going to pay someone else to do it for me. I do the same when I want to eat fish or goat, or fix my car. The whole point of a developed economy is that you don't know how to produce the stuff you need. Instead, you produce what you're good at producing, and everyone reaps the gains from trade. The title of this piece strikes me as a little over-specific. What in sub-Saharan Africa doesn't suck?

by RyanZAG 11y ago

noobermin 11y ago

I'm not sure how related this is, but my parents are from a Pacific island, Palau (I've mentioned it before in other comment threads). One of the things that hurts progress in my country isn't really a lack of education as much as it is ignorance in the strict sense. It's funny, because a couple of years ago, a trans-Pacific cable was laid close to the island, but the decision was made to not invest in tapping into it due to the cost--even nowadays, people are interested in improving connections, but it isn't a priority. They really haven't experienced the internet, at least not in it's full capacity, so they don't know what they are missing. They know about it from what they see on T.V. ("viral" review shows targeted at baby-boomers who still watch T.V., I suppose) and social networking, so simply, they don't know what they're missing. I recall when I finish high school and moved back here to the US for college--I basically missed the dotcom-boom days of the late 90's and early to mid 2000's, the internet was not just a convenience, it completely changed my living habits. But the so-called "other three billion" really can't know this because they haven't experienced this, so not only do you face real obstacles, but you face lethargy as well. At least for Palau, I feel like that is one of the main reasons internet access is pretty subpar there today. [*] I do admit that this might not be relevant in parts of Africa. For one, Palau is a pretty small place (no more than twenty-thousand people), so attitudes are probably much more homogeneous (with that attitude towards the urgency of improving internet infrastructure) compared to hosts of nations with millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.

karmazeroed 11y ago

Yes, the issues are substantially bigger. South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities, never mind elsewhere. People living there tell me it's not a problem. If they're not bothered by that, I doubt they give a damn about google searches. If memory serves me correctly that's been going on for about 10 years now.

hstrauss 11y ago
South African here. There's the electricity issue (we call the rolling blackouts "load-shedding") which affects the cellular base-stations and telco exchanges as much as anything, but also another more obvious issue for content delivery: the local loop. For the past 15+ years (as long as I've had Internet access), the incumbent telco (TelkomSA) has not been forthcoming with upgrading or maintaining the ADSL infrastructure. Finally, there seems to be traction with FTTx providers, but this seems limited to affluent pockets of a few thousand people in the country. All the new fibre offerings serve the same locations. While it's hopeful this will improve the situation in the medium-term, the backhaul from ISP to eyeball is oversubscribed at least 30:1 for ADSL, with equipment being replaced by (IMO) inferior network equipment. Additionally, there are reports of automated line-conditioning software which should improve local loop connectivity, but I've seen DSL sync issues only since the software has been implemented. The (ex-public, privatised under Telkom) Exchanges have been neglected and have recently been divided into three groups: Earners, Maintainers and "Lost Causes". The latter two will not receive upgrades from ADSL1 and the Earners will likely migrate to newer technologies. This is largely due to copper-theft and vandalism of exchanges/cellular base-stations (which are oversubscribed enough that wireless technologies routinely sustain 3000-20000ms latencies). The oligopoly running cellular networks have no incentive to improve this, since the Regulatory Authorities don't really seem to push competition as well as we'd like. TL;DR: There are issues, but rose-tinted glasses make me hopeful in the medium term. Claims are that wireless will fix everything seem bleak, since base stations become oversubscribed faster than they can be built/upgraded (and the backhaul from them is measured in megabits/s, rather than gigabits/s charged at ~US$0.15/MB).
- nroets 11y ago
  I also live in South Africa. Our mobile networks are in pretty good shape: * Anyone can buy a prepaid SIM from any supermarket and access the Internet within 10 or 20 minutes. Last time I visited France, it took me 4 days to achieve a similar result. * Mobile data is cheap when buying in bulk. I pay USD2 per gigabyte. * LTE coverage is growing fast and RTT is good. For example my ping time to google.com is 30ms. Conclusion: Private ownership and free markets lead to good service and low cost. ESKOM proves that state ownership of companies and monopolies lead to bad service at high cost.

thaumasiotes 11y ago

> consider someone in a village (with a cellphone and access to a data network) who wants to find out why something happened to the carrot he was growing at home. All of us would pop open Google and search about some information about carrots. A guy in a village would head up the road to talk to his friend who's been farming for 50 years and knows about carrots Speaking as a US native, the reason we'd look for carrot information on the internet is that none of us know anybody with carrot experience. If I knew someone who knew about carrots, they'd see all of my carrot questions before I ever asked the internet.

jaredhansen 11y ago
Yes, but this is the central advantage of distributed information: while your carrot-farmer buddy is a higher-bandwidth and possibly deeper source of carrot information than google is, that guy doesn't know so much about goat husbandry. Or fishing. Or roof construction, or car repair, etc. So if carrot info is all you ever need, great -- but otherwise, you are going to need nearby buddies who are experts in many, many other things. In fact, you're going to need far more buddies than you can ever actually have, due to the limits of the number of social connections any of us can have (not to mention the limits that time itself imposes on the conversations we'd have to have in order to maintain those relationships even if we could keep them all straight in our heads). Google's primary utility isn't in making you a perfect expert on anything in particular -- it's that it allows you to become sufficiently expert at anything at all in a really short period of time. Even an army of friends, with the most varied experience you can imagine, cannot come close to matching the breadth of expertise available via the net.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  I plan to live out my whole life knowing nothing about carrot farming, goat husbandry, fishing, roof construction, or car repair. What's going on here is that Africa isn't really reaping the benefits of specialization of labor in the way the civilized world is. The guy in the example isn't even growing multiple carrots! When I get a problem with my roof, I'm not going to try to fix it myself after a crash course in Google-based roof repair. I'm going to pay someone else to do it for me. I do the same when I want to eat fish or goat, or fix my car. The whole point of a developed economy is that you don't know how to produce the stuff you need. Instead, you produce what you're good at producing, and everyone reaps the gains from trade. The title of this piece strikes me as a little over-specific. What in sub-Saharan Africa doesn't suck?