Pingdom, which monitors Web sites’ uptime, recently posted figures shedding some light on the state of Internet connections in Africa on its blog. Traffic and penetration were focused on.
Internet exchange point (IXP) traffic showed that the throughput figures of various cities in the African continent were found to range kilobit to megabit per second. In comparison, the majority of the world outside of Africa experiences traffic speeds in gigabit per second. For instance, the Netherlands has IXP traffic at 413 Gbps, while Germany has traffic throughput at 380 Gbps. The fastest throughput of the African cities observed by Pingdom occurred in Nairobi, Kenya, where traffic was observed at 14 Mbps.
In terms of the average Internet penetration in Africa, about 4.7% of the population there is connected to the Web. Europe’s penetration is 43.4%, North America’s is 71.1%, and the world as a whole has a 20% penetration rate.
Still, Africa’s 4.7% equates to 44 million people who are online.
Broadband penetration is a measly 0.1%, limited mostly to schools, major companies, and authorities.
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