Contents

Introduction

What Is Feasibility?

Methodology

Summary of Results

A Closer Look at Each University:
Zambia
Makerere
Ghana
Cheikh Anta Diop

Recommendations

Conclusions and Next Steps

Acknowledgements

University of Zambia

The University of Zambia has been a pioneer of Internet connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa, boasting the first Internet connection on the continent outside of Egypt and South Africa. Zamnet, as the service provider is known, was eventually incorporated as a separate, private entity and it still provides the university with its Internet connection today. The university's connection to Zamnet is at 128 kbps via a radio link, which costs approximately US$2,000 per month.

The university's local area network (LAN) is a single-ring ethernet connecting some one thousand PCs, all of which can access the Internet. The main Internet access center is located in the library's basement, where 40 terminals are available to the entire university community. The room is reserved for classes in the mornings, but is open from 1-9 pm on a daily basis. There are no fees charged for Internet access.

Most of the test downloading was performed by the study team, complemented by a demonstration trial session organized for a group of interested faculty members.

PDF files: We were unable to download successfully any PDF article over 130 kilobytes, regardless of time of day. Since the vast majority of journal articles are well over 130 kb, this result indicates an obvious problem. The average data transfer rate was very low, even on files successfully obtained (e.g., a 99 kb file was downloaded in six minutes, an average transfer rate of about 275 bytes per second; a 33 kb file was downloaded in four minutes, for an average of 138 bytes per second). Typically, larger files would stall completely at some percentage of completion, i.e., they would stop downloading at all no matter how much time they were given. The best we were able to do in terms of bytes received on a single download attempt was 56 percent of a 371 kb file (208 kb) before the connection was manually terminated (after 21 minutes of total inactivity). Table 3 shows samples of the PDF results.

HTML files: HTML articles were successfully accessed from both Science magazine and the British journal Nature, albeit slowly (see Table 4). Generally speaking, the text portion of a given article would appear within about two minutes, with graphics continuing to download for several additional minutes. Each file shown in the table is a separate component file of a complete article.

Technical modifications: We transferred the FreeBSD Unix operating system and Squid proxy server to a permanent home on the UNZA network. FreeBSD and Squid are known for their stable operations, and the improvement was noticed immediately by UNZA staff. Another proxy server system had been in use up to that time, but would crash several times a day. As of this writing, the Squid server running on FreeBSD has been running continuously with no problems for over a month.

Assessment: Accessing online journals from the University of Zambia, with an average data transfer rate of under 300 bps and a total inability to download most PDF files, is clearly going to be problematic under current conditions. At the moment, university staff are reluctant to promote Internet access or offer training because the slow connection cannot support a large number of users. We cannot identify the source of the problem definitively without a much more involved series of tests, but contributing factors may include:

• an overburdened LAN, with too many computers sharing the single-physical-segment ethernet;
• the Windows operating system's poor handling of slow or congested lines; and
• the location of the journals themselves with regard to the way UNZA's Internet traffic is routed.