The increased bandwidth fallacy: performance and usage in rural Zambia

Abstract

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.