Monitoring the Digital Divide

Abstract

It is increasingly important to support the large numbers of scientists working in remote areas and having low -bandwidth access to the Internet. This will continue to be the case for years to come since there is evidence from PingER performance measurements that the, so-called, digital divide is not decreasing. In this work, we review the collaborative work of The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste -a leading organization promoting science dissemination in the developing world- and SLAC in Stanford, to monitor by PingER, Universities and Research Institutions all over the developing world following the recent Recommendations of Trieste to help bridge the digital divide. As a result, PingER's deployment now covers the real-time monitoring of worldwide Internet performance and, in particular, West and Central Africa for the first time. We report on theresults from the ICTP sites and quantitatively identify regions with poor performance, identify trends, discuss experiences and future work.