The Internet in Africa is evolving rapidly, yet remains significantly behind other regions in terms of performance and ubiquity of access. This clearly has negative consequences for the residents of Africa, but also has implications for organisations designing future networked technologies that might see deployment in the region. This paper presents a measurement campaign methodology to explore the current state of the African Internet. Using vantage points across the continent, we perform the first large-scale mapping of inter-country delays in Africa. Our analysis reveals a number of clusters, where countries have built up low delay interconnectivity, dispelling the myth that intra-communications in Africa are universally poor. Unfortunately, this does not extend to the remainder of the continent, which typically suffers from excessively high delays, often exceeding 300ms. We find that in many cases it is faster to reach European or North American networks that those in other regions of Africa. By mapping the internetwork topology, we identify a number of shortcomings in the infrastructure, most notably an excessive reliance on intercontinental transit providers.

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Free Basics is a Facebook initiative to provide zero-rated web services in developing countries. The program has grown rapidly to 60+ countries in the past two years. But it has also seen strong opposition from Internet activists and has been banned in some countries like India. Facebook highlights the societal benefits of providing low-income populations with free Internet access, while detractors point to concerns about privacy and network neutrality. In this paper, we provide the first independent analysis of such claims regarding the Free Basics service, using both the perspective of a Free Basics service provider and of web clients visiting the service via cellular phones providing access to Free Basics in Pakistan and South Africa. Specifically, with control of both endpoints, we not only provide a more detailed view of how the Free Basics service is architected, but also can isolate the likely causes of network performance impairments. Our analysis reveals that Free Basics services experience 4 to 12 times worse network performance than their paid counterparts. We isolate the root causes using factors such as network path inflation and throttling policies by Facebook and telecom service providers. The Free Basics service and its restrictions are designed with assumptions about users' device capabilities (e.g., lack of JavaScript support). To evaluate such assumptions, we infer the types of mobile devices that generated 47K unique visitors to our Free Basics services between Sep 2016 and Jan 2017. We find that there are large numbers of requests from constrained WAP browsers, but also large fractions of high-capability mobile phones that send Free Basics requests. We discuss the implications of our observations, with the hope to aid more informed debates on such telecom policies.