Analysis of WWW traffic in Cambodia and Ghana
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
Beyond pilots: keeping rural wireless networks alive
NSDI'08 Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
CUBIC: a new TCP-friendly high-speed TCP variant
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review - Research and developments in the Linux kernel
Website optimization
Optimizing high latency links in the developing world
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM workshop on Wireless networks and systems for developing regions
Internet usage and performance analysis of a rural wireless network in Macha, Zambia
Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions
Towards understanding developing world traffic
Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions
Low-infrastructure methods to improve internet access for mobile users in emerging regions
Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
Traffic characterization and internet usage in rural Africa
Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
Bassa: a time shifted web caching system for developing regions
NSDR '11 Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Networked systems for developing regions
VillageShare: facilitating content generation and sharing in rural networks
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
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Broadband Internet access has become a critical part of socio-economic prosperity; however, only 6 in 100 inhabitants have access to broadband in developing countries. This limited access is driven predominately by subscriptions in urban areas. In rural developing communities, access is often provided through slow satellite, or other low-bandwidth long-distance wireless links, if available at all. As a result, the quality of the Internet access is often poor and at times unusable. In this paper we study the performance and usage implications of an Internet access upgrade, from a 256kbps satellite link to a 2Mbps terrestrial wireless link in rural Zambia. While usage did not immediately change, performance improved soon after the upgrade. By three months post-upgrade, however, subscribers began to use the faster connection for more bandwidth-hungry applications such as video-streaming and content upload. This change in usage resulted in dramatic deterioration of network performance, whereby the average round trip time doubled, the amount of bytes associated with failed uploads increased by 222% and that of failed downloads by 91%. Thus, while an Internet access upgrade should translate to improved performance and user experience, in rural environments with limited access speed and growing demand, it can bring unexpected consequences.