Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2011
Volume 56, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, April 30–May 3 2011; Anaheim, California
Session J6: The Digital Divide in 2010 |
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Sponsoring Units: FIP Chair: Harvey Newman, California Institute Technology Room: Terrace A-F |
Sunday, May 1, 2011 1:30PM - 2:06PM |
J6.00001: The Digital Divide: A Global View Invited Speaker: Huge progress was made in bridging the digital divide in first decade of 21$^{\rm st}$ century. This was largely due to the explosive growth of mobile, which saw numbers rise from under 500 million to over five billion mobile cellular subscriptions in just ten years. With household mobile penetration rates of over 50\% even in rural areas of developing countries, we have achieved the dream of bringing all the world's people within reach of communications technology. We must now, however, replicate the mobile miracle for the Internet, and especially broadband, if we are to avoid creating a new broadband breach to replace the digital divide. Three things need to happen for this to be achieved: firstly, broadband needs to be brought to the top of the development agenda; secondly, broadband needs to become much more affordable and thirdly, security needs to be part of the strategy. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 1, 2011 2:06PM - 2:42PM |
J6.00002: Research and education networks in Latin America: a Time of Change Invited Speaker: Since 2004, when RedCLARA was deployed as the first Latin American regional network, there have been significant infrastructure developments in some of the national networks, as well as in RedCLARA itself, mostly due to the use of optical transmission systems. This presentation will describe some of these developments and the impact they are having on advanced applications and collaboration. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 1, 2011 2:42PM - 3:18PM |
J6.00003: Quantifying the Worldwide Digital Divide: The Emergence of Africa Invited Speaker: Africa is huge with over 1 billion people, speaking over 1000 languages, with huge rainforests and vast deserts. Yet as we shall show it badly lags behind the rest of the world in its Internet performance. This talk will show how we measure the Internet Performance. These measurements cover countries of the world containing over 99{\%} of the world's Internet connected population. Using these measurements we illustrate the overall Internet performance for the world in particular for: throughput, losses, jitter, Round Trip Times, availability etc. We will demonstrate the performance trends for the last 13 years, in particular illustrating how Africa is not only behind all other regions and one to two decades behind developed regions, but worse is falling further behind. We also compare our results with the International Telecommunications Union's ICT Development Index (IDI) that measures the development for over 150 countries. We then focus on the promising emerging situation in Africa following the dramatic increases in performance due to submarine fibre connectivity that was driven partially by soccer's 2010 World Cup in South Africa. We conclude that despite the many challenges in Africa, there is promising potential for a dramatic improvement in the near future, but there is still a long way to go. [Preview Abstract] |
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