research-article

Exploring and Analysing the African Web Ecosystem

Authors:

Rodérick Fanou,

Eder Leao Fernandes,

Pierre Francois,

Francisco Valera,

Arjuna SathiaseelanAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), Volume 12, Issue 4

Article No.: 22, Pages 1 - 26

https://doi.org/10.1145/3213897

Published: 27 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

It is well known that internet infrastructure deployment is progressing at a rapid pace in the African continent. A flurry of recent research has quantified this, highlighting the expansion of its underlying connectivity network. However, improving the infrastructure is not useful without appropriately provisioned services to exploit it. This article measures the availability and utilisation of web infrastructure in Africa. Whereas others have explored web infrastructure in developed regions, we shed light on practices in developing regions. To achieve this, we apply a comprehensive measurement methodology to collect data from a variety of sources. We first focus on Google to reveal that its content infrastructure in Africa is, indeed, expanding. That said, we find that much of its web content is still served from the US and Europe, despite being the most popular website in many African countries. We repeat the same analysis across a number of other regionally popular websites to find that even top African websites prefer to host their content abroad. To explore the reasons for this, we evaluate some of the major bottlenecks facing content delivery networks (CDNs) in Africa. Amongst other factors, we find a lack of peering between the networks hosting our probes, preventing the sharing of CDN servers, as well as poorly configured DNS resolvers. Finally, our mapping of middleboxes in the region reveals that there is a greater presence of transparent proxies in Africa than in Europe or the US. We conclude the work with a number of suggestions for alleviating the issues observed.

References

[1]

Google Africa Blog. 2018. Retrieved February 2018 from http://google-africa.blogspot.co.uk/.

[2]

Hola VPN. 2018. Retrieved April 2018 from https://hola.org.

[3]

African Union. 2018. African Internet eXchange System (AXIS). Retrieved April 2018 from https://au.int/en/axis.

[4]

AFRINIC. 2017. AFRINIC Database. Retrieved April 2018 from ftp://ftp.afrinic.net/pub/stats/afrinic/.

[5]

Bernhard Ager, Wolfgang Mühlbauer, Georgios Smaragdakis, and Steve Uhlig. 2011. Web content cartography. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, 585--600.

Digital Library

[6]

Alexa. 2018. Alexa Websites. Retrieved April 2018 from http://www.alexa.com/topsites/.

[7]

APNIC. 2018. APNIC Database. Retrieved April 2018 from ftp://ftp.apnic.net/pub/stats/apnic/.

[8]

ARIN. 2018. ARIN Database. Retrieved April 2018 from ftp://ftp.arin.net/pub/stats/arin/.

[9]

Jérôme Bezzina. 2005. Interconnection challenges in a converging environment. The World Bank (2005). Global Information and Communication Technologies Department.

[10]

Zachary Bischof, Fabián Bustamante, and Rade Stanojevic. 2014. Need, want, can afford—Broadband markets and the behavior of users. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, 73--86.

Digital Library

[11]

Ignacio Castro, Juan Camilo Cardona, Sergey Gorinsky, and Pierre Francois. 2014. Remote peering: More peering without internet flattening. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM International on Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies. ACM, 185--198.

Digital Library

[12]

Marshini Chetty, Srikanth Sundaresan, Sachit Muckaden, Nick Feamster, and Enrico Calandro. 2013. Measuring broadband performance in South Africa. In Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development. ACM, 1.

Digital Library

[13]

Danilo Cicalese, Diana Joumblatt, Dario Rossi, Marc-Olivier Buob, Jordan Augé, and Timur Friedman. 2015. A fistful of pings: Accurate and lightweight anycast enumeration and geolocation. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM’15). IEEE, 2776--2784.

[14]

Carlo Contavalli, Warren van der Gaast, D. Lawrence, and Warren Kumari. 2016. Client subnet in DNS queries (No. RFC 7871).

[15]

Pelsser Cristel, Cittadini Luca, Vissicchio Stefano, and Randy Bush. 2013. From Paris to Tokyo: On the suitability of ping to measure latency. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC’13). 427--432.

Digital Library

[16]

M. Crovella and B. Krishnamurthy. 2006. Internet Measurement: Infrastructure, Traffic and Applications. John Wiley 8 Sons, Inc.

Digital Library

[17]

Joao Damas, Michael Graff, and Paul Vixie. 2013. Extension mechanisms for DNS (EDNS (0)) (No. RFC 6891).

[18]

Ekinops. 2017. Liquid telecom deploys new optical network in Africa using Ekinops Long-Haul DWDM technology. Retrieved July 2017 from http://www.ekinops.net/en/press-releases/liquid-telecom-deploys-new-optical-network-in-africa-using-ekinops-long-haul-dwdm-technology.

[19]

Yehia Elkhatib, Gareth Tyson, and Michael Welzl. 2014. Can SPDY really make the web faster? In Networking Conference, 2014 IFIP. IEEE, 1--9.

[20]

Xun Fan, Ethan Katz-Bassett, and John Heidemann. 2015. Assessing affinity between users and CDNs sites. In International Workshop on Trac Monitoring and Analysis. Springer, 95--110.

[21]

Rodérick Fanou, Amogh Dhamdhere, and Francisco Valera. 2017. Investigating the causes of congestion on the African IXP substrate. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC’17). ACM, 57--63.

Digital Library

[22]

Rodérick Fanou, Valera Francisco, Pierre Francois, and Amogh Dhamdhere. 2017. Reshaping the African internet: From scattered islands to a connected continent. Computer Communications 113 (September 2017), 25--42.

Digital Library

[23]

Rodérick Fanou, Pierre Francois, and Emile Aben. 2015. On the diversity of interdomain routing in Africa. In International Conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement (PAM'15). Springer, 41--54.

[24]

Roderick Fanou, Pierre Francois, Emile Aben, Michuki Mwangi, Nishal Goburdhan, and Francisco Valera. 2017. Four years tracking unrevealed topological changes in the African interdomain. Computer Communications (2017).

Digital Library

[25]

Rod’erick Fanou, Gareth Tyson, Eder Leao Fernandes, Pierre Francois, Francisco Valera, and Arjuna Sathiaseelan. 2018. Technical Report: African Content Measurement Campaign. https://techrepwebinf:bRCA9hFZfourier.networks.imdea.org/external/techrep_web_infrastructure/index/.

[26]

Rodérick Fanou, Gareth Tyson, Pierre Francois, and Arjuna Sathiaseelan. 2016. Pushing the frontier: Exploring the African web ecosystem. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW’16).

Digital Library

[27]

R. Farahbakhsh, A. Cuevas, A. M. Ortiz, X. Han, and N Crespi. 2015. How far is Facebook from me? Facebook network infrastructure analysis. IEEE Communications Magazine 53 (2015), 134--142.

[28]

Agustin Formoso, Josiah Chavula, Amreesh Phokeer, Arjuna Sathiaseelan, and Gareth Tyson. 2018. Deep diving into Africa’s inter-country latencies. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM’18). http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/tysong/files/africa-internet.pdf.

[29]

Manaf Gharaibeh, Anant Shah, Bradley Huffaker, Hang Zhang, Roya Ensafi, and Christos Papadopoulos. 2017. A look at router geolocation in public and commercial databases. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC’17).

Digital Library

[30]

B. Gueye, A. Ziviani, M. Crovella, and S. B. Fdida. 2006. Constraint-based geolocation of internet hosts. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

Digital Library

[31]

Arpit Gupta, Matt Calder, Nick Feamster, Marshini Chetty, Enrico Calandro, and Ethan Katz-Bassett. 2014. Peering at the internet’s frontier: A first look at ISP interconnectivity in Africa. In Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement (PAM’14) Conference. Springer, 204--213.

Digital Library

[32]

R. Hofstede, P. Čeleda, B. Trammell, I. Drago, R. Sadre, A. Sperotto, and A. Pras. 2014. Flow monitoring explained: From packet capture to data analysis with NetFlow and IPFIX. IEEE Communications Surveys Tutorials, Vol. 16. 2037--2064.

[33]

Qi Huang, Ken Birman, Robbert van Renesse, Wyatt Lloyd, Sanjeev Kumar, and Harry C. Li. 2013. An analysis of Facebook photo caching. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. ACM, 167--181.

Digital Library

[34]

Bradley Huffaker, Marina Fomenkov, and K. Claffy. 2011. Geocompare: A comparison of public and commercial geolocation databases. In Proceedings of Network Mapping and Measurement Conference (NMMC'11). 1--12. http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2011/geocompare-tr.

[35]

Internet World Stats. 2017. Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics. Retrieved April 2018 from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

[36]

Livadariu Ioana, Elmokashfi Ahmed, and Dhamdhere Amogh. 2017. Measuring IPv6 adoption in Africa. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Internet Measurements Research in Africa.

[37]

Michael Kende and Karen Rose. 2015. Promoting Local Content Hosting to Develop the Internet Ecosystem. ISOC Report.

[38]

Kyle Spencer. 2018. The African IXP Association. Retrieved April 2018 from https://wp.internetsociety.org/afpif/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2017/10/Africa-IXP-Survey-Report.pdf.

[39]

LACNIC. 2018. LACNIC Database. Retrieved April 2018 from ftp://ftp.lacnic.net/pub/stats/lacnic/.

[40]

Liquid Telecom. 2017. Liquid Telecom network map. Retrieved August 2017 from http://liquidtelecom.com/about-us/network-map.

[41]

Calder Matt, Fan Xun, Hu Zi, Ethan Katz-Basset, Heidemann John, and Govidan Ramesh. 2013. Mapping the expansion of google’s serving infrastructure. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC’13).

Digital Library

[42]

MaxMind. 2018. GeoIP. Retrieved April 2018 from http://www.maxmind.com/en/geolocation_landing.

[43]

David Naylor, Alessandro Finamore, Ilias Leontiadis, Yan Grunenberger, Marco Mellia, Maurizio Munafò, Konstantina Papagiannaki, and Peter Steenkiste. 2014. The cost of the s in https. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM International on Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies. ACM, 133--140.

Digital Library

[44]

Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC). 2018. Map of African Terrestrial and Undersea Fibre Networks. Retrieved April 2018 from https://afterfibre.nsrc.org/.

[45]

Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC). 2018. Mapping Undersea and Terrestrial Fibre Optic Cables. Retrieved April 2018 from https://afterfibre.nsrc.org/.

[46]

Patrick Okui. 2016. International Internet Bandwidth and Pricing Trends in Africa (Telegeography). Retrieved August 2016 from https://www.slideshare.net/InternetSociety/international-bandwidth-and-pricing-trends-in-subsahara-africa.

[47]

John S. Otto, Mario A. Sánchez, John P. Rula, and Fabián E. Bustamante. 2012. Content delivery and the natural evolution of DNS: Remote DNS trends, performance issues and alternative solutions. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, 523--536.

Digital Library

[48]

Packet Clearing House (PCH). 2018. Internet Exchange Point Growth. Retrieved April 2018 from https://prefix.pch.net/applications/ixpdir/summary/growth/.

[49]

Packet Clearing House (PCH). 2018. PCH IXP directory. Retrieved April 2018 from http://prefix.pch.net/images/applications/ixpdir/ip_asn_mapping.txt.

[50]

PeeringDB. 2017. Retrieved July 2017 from http://www.peeringdb.com/private/exchange_list.php.

[51]

Ingmar Poese, Steve Uhlig, Mohamed Ali Kaafar, Benoit Donnet, and Bamba Gueye. 2011. IP geolocation databases: Unreliable? ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 41, 2 (2011), 53--56.

Digital Library

[52]

PriMetrica. 2017. TeleGeography Internet Exchange Map. Retrieved July 2017 from http://www.internetexchangemap.com/.

[53]

Rajiv Ramaswami, Kumar Sivarajan, and Galen Sasaki. 2009. Optical Networks: A Practical Perspective. Morgan Kaufmann.

Digital Library

[54]

Philipp Richter, Mark Allman, Randy Bush, and Vern Paxson. 2015. A primer on IPv4 scarcity. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (2015), 21--31.

Digital Library

[55]

RIPE NCC. 2018. Global RIPE Atlas Network Coverage. Retrieved April 2018 from https://atlas.ripe.net/results/maps/network-coverage/.

[56]

RIPE NCC. 2018. OpenIPMap database. Retrieved June 2018 from https://labs.ripe.net/Members/emileaben/infrastructure-geolocation-plan-of-action.

[57]

RIPE NCC. 2018. RIPE Atlas—Raw Data Structure Documentation. Retrieved April 2018 from https://atlas.ripe.net/docs/data_struct/.

[58]

RIPE NCC. 2018. RIPE NCC Database. ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/stats/.

[59]

Steve Song. 2018. African Undersea Cables. https://manypossibilities.net/african-undersea-cables/.

[60]

Steve Song. 2018. Mapping Terrestrial Fibre Optic Cable Projects in Africa. Retrieved April 2018 from https://afterfibre.net/.

[61]

Florian Streibelt, Jan Böttger, Nikolaos Chatzis, Georgios Smaragdakis, and Anja Feldmann. 2013. Exploring EDNS-client-subnet adopters in your free time. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, 305--312.

Digital Library

[62]

Ao-Jan Su, David R. Choffnes, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, and Fabián E. Bustamante. 2006. Drafting behind Akamai (Travelocity-based detouring). In ACM SIGCOMM’06 Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communications, Vol. 36. ACM, 435--446.

Digital Library

[63]

Submarine Telecoms Forum, Inc. 2017. Submarine Telecoms Industry Report 2017. Technical Report. Terabit Consulting.

[64]

Team Cymru. 2018. Team Cymru Services. Retrieved April 2018 from https://www.team-cymru.com/.

[65]

The African IXP Association (Af-IX). 2018. List of Active Internet eXchange Points in Africa. http://www.af-ix.net/ixps-list.

[66]

Nyirenda-Jere Towela and Biru Tesfaye. 2015. Internet Development and Internet Governance in Africa. Technical Report. Internet Society (ISOC).

[67]

Gareth Tyson, Shan Huang, Felix Cuadrado, Ignacio Castro, Vasile Perta, Arjuna Sathiaseelan, and Steve Uhlig. 2017. Exploring HTTP header manipulation in the wild. In WWW Conference.

Digital Library

[68]

J. Weil, V. Kuarsingh, C. Donley, C. Liljenstolpe, and M. Azinger. 2012. IANA-reserved IPv4 prefix for shared address space.

[69]

Yasir Zaki, Jay Chen, Thomas Pötsch, and Talal Ahmad Lakshminarayanan Subramanian. 2014. Dissecting web latency in ghana. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC’14).

Digital Library

Cited By

Bian RJin LHao SWang HCotton C(2024)Silent Observers Make a Difference: A Large-scale Analysis of Transparent Proxies on the InternetIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621441(1671-1680)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621441
Kumar RAsif SLee EBustamante F(2023)Each at its Own Pace: Third-Party Dependency and Centralization Around the WorldProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/35794377:1(1-29)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579437
Chen YMa XZhou AWang S(2023)Cooperative Content Caching and Distribution for Satellite CDNs2023 IEEE 31st International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)10.1109/ICNP59255.2023.10355590(1-6)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICNP59255.2023.10355590
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Exploring and Analysing the African Web Ecosystem

Recommendations

Pushing the Frontier: Exploring the African Web Ecosystem
WWW '16: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web

It is well known that Africa's mobile and fixed Internet infrastructure is progressing at a rapid pace. A flurry of recent research has quantified this, highlighting the expansion of its underlying connectivity network. However, improving the ...
Exploring the Ecosystem of DNS HTTPS Resource Records: An End-to-End Perspective
IMC '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference

The DNS HTTPS resource record is a new DNS record type designed for the delivery of configuration information and parameters required to initiate connections to HTTPS network services. In addition, it is a key enabler for TLS Encrypted ClientHello (ECH) ...
Accessibility perspectives on enabling South African sign language in the South African national accessibility portal
W4A '09: Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A)

Persons with disabilities are often marginalised from economy and society due to the lack of access to disability related information and services. Through the use of assistive technologies access to the information and services can often be obtained ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on the Web

ACM Transactions on the Web Volume 12, Issue 4

November 2018

215 pages

ISSN:1559-1131

EISSN:1559-114X

DOI:10.1145/3281744

Editor:
Brian D. Davison
Lehigh University, USA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 September 2018

Accepted: 01 April 2018

Revised: 01 February 2018

Received: 01 July 2017

Published in TWEB Volume 12, Issue 4

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Funding Sources

European Commission FP7 project LEONE
EU H2020
IMDEA Networks Institute
EU H2020 ENDEAVOUR
GCRF

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

7
Total Citations
View Citations
217
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)13
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 07 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Bian RJin LHao SWang HCotton C(2024)Silent Observers Make a Difference: A Large-scale Analysis of Transparent Proxies on the InternetIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621441(1671-1680)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621441
Kumar RAsif SLee EBustamante F(2023)Each at its Own Pace: Third-Party Dependency and Centralization Around the WorldProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/35794377:1(1-29)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579437
Chen YMa XZhou AWang S(2023)Cooperative Content Caching and Distribution for Satellite CDNs2023 IEEE 31st International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)10.1109/ICNP59255.2023.10355590(1-6)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICNP59255.2023.10355590
Arouna APhokeer AElmokashfi A(2021)A First Look at the African’s ccTLDs Technical EnvironmentTowards new e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries10.1007/978-3-030-70572-5_19(305-326)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70572-5_19
Mbewe EChavula J(2021)On QoE Impact of DoH and DoT in Africa: Why a User’s DNS Choice MattersTowards new e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries10.1007/978-3-030-70572-5_18(289-304)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70572-5_18
Bhattacherjee DKassing SLicciardello MSingla AZhao BZheng HMadhyastha HPadmanabhan V(2020)In-orbit ComputingProceedings of the 19th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3422604.3425937(197-204)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3422604.3425937
Candela MGregori ELuconi VVecchio A(2019)Dissecting the Speed-of-Internet of Middle EastIEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845104(720-725)Online publication date: Apr-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845104
Kiedanski DNogueira MGrampín E(2019)Youtube traffic from the perspective of a developing country: the case of UruguayIEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845096(714-719)Online publication date: Apr-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845096

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents