Network access speeds can vary hundreds of times from place to place. We talk about projects that seek to deliver high-speed Internet to remote regions.
We will also talk about how network access is regulated in Asia and the Middle East.
Slow Internet seats-- they're still there.
There are points on the planet where the speed of access to the network is much lower than comfortable. For example, in the English village of Trimley-Saint-Martin the speed of downloading content is about 0.68 Mbps. The situation is even worse in Bamferlong (Gloucestershire), where the average speed of the Internet is only 0.14 Mbit/s. Of course, in developed countries such problems are only observed in sparsely populated areas. Similar "low speed" zones can be found in France, Ireland and even the United States.
But there are whole states for which the slow Internet is the norm. Yemen is considered the country with the slowest Internet today. There, the average download speed is 0.38 Mbit/s - users spend more than 30 hours downloading a 5-gigabyte file. The list of slow Internet countries also includes Turkmenistan, Syria and Paraguay. This is not the case on the African continent. As Quartz writes, Madagascar is the only country in Africa where the content download speed exceeds 10 Mbps.
A couple of materials from our blog on Habra:
Retrospective: How IPv4 addresses have been exhausted
Who introduces IPv6, and what's stopping its development
The quality of communication is one of the determining factors influencing the social and economic condition of the country. The Telegraph says that the slow Internet often forces young people to leave rural areas. Another example is Lagos (Nigeria's largest city), where a new technological IT ecosystem is emerging. And problems with network connectivity can lead to the loss of developers and potential customers. Interestingly, an increase in the number of Internet users in Africa of only 10% would increase international trade by about half a percent. That is why today there are actively developing projects, the task of which is to deliver the Internet even to the most remote corners of the globe.
Who builds networks in hard-to-reach regions
In areas where few people live, investments in infrastructure pay off longer than in large cities. For example, in Singapore, where, according to the SpeedTest index, the fastest Internet in the world, the population density is 7.3 thousand people per square kilometer. The development of IT infrastructure here looks much more interesting compared to small villages in Africa. But despite this, similar projects are still developing.
For example, Loon is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. - Alphabet Inc. strives to provide African countries with access to the network using balloons. They raise the telecommunication equipment to a height of 20 kilometers and provide communication area of 5 square kilometers. In midsummer, Loon gave the green light to conduct commercial tests in Kenya.
There are examples from another part of the world. In Alaska, mountain ranges, fishing and permafrost prevent cables from being laid. Therefore, two years ago, the American operator General Communication (GCI) built there a radio relay (RRL) network several thousand kilometers long. It covers the southwestern part of the state. Engineers have erected more than a hundred towers with microwave transceivers, which provide Internet access for 45 thousand people.
How networks in different countries regulate
Recently, many media outlets have often written about the regulation of the Internet and the laws that are being adopted in the West and in Europe. However, bills that are worth considering are emerging in Asia and the Middle East. For example, a couple of years ago, India passed the Temporary Suspension of Telecommunications Services Act. The law has already been tested in practice - in 2017, it caused Internet connectivity disruptions in Kashmir, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal and Maharashtra.
A similar law has been in force in China since 2015. It also allows for the local restriction of Internet access for national security reasons. Similar rules apply in Ethiopia and Iraq, where the Internet is 'shut down' during school exams.
There are also draft laws that relate to the operation of individual Internet services. Two years ago, the Chinese government obliged local providers and telecommunications companies to block traffic through VPN services that were not officially registered.
And in Australia, a bill that prohibits messengers from using end-to-end encryption was passed. A number of Western countries - in particular, Great Britain and the USA - are already looking at the experience of their Australian colleagues and are planning to promote a similar bill. Whether they will be able to do anything will have to be seen in the near future.