Thank you for your interest in joining this project. 👍🏾 🎊 We are excited to have you on board!
To work with researchers to collect and analyse Internet measurements data so that regulators and policy makers can develop policy that will help Internet Service Providers to improve service delivery and end users to make informed choices.
This README explains the Broadband Perfomance and Internet Measurements in Africa, what inspired us to start and how you can get involved.
- Inspiration
- Problem
- Proposed Solution
- Why Internet Measurements
- How you can contribute
- About Us and Contacts
- MozSprint
The interest for this project developed while working on a conference paper as part of Research ICT Africa's Internet Measurements project. While developing the paper, it was very difficult to find published information on the subject. Collecting information from websites of regulators and Internet service providers of the 7 African countries identified for the project was very complex. Other issues, like which broadband provider to use, may seem complex because available information is based on personal preference, which may be biased sometimes.
There is very little publicly available or published information related to broadband performance and Internet measurements in Africa. Even when regulators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are required to make a lot of this information public, it is not always the case. Some organisations publish the information, while others do not. It could be linked to little awareness or no interest.
When an end-user, for example, moves to a new country, it may be hard for them to find information about service providers in their new location and some comparison or analysis to help them make better decisions on their choice of provider. On other occassions, end-users claim that their providers do not give them what they are paying for. For regulators, it is hard to implement policy and monitor providers if little is known about their performance.
We are proposing to build an open data platform that contains Internet performance information and some analysis from the last 5 years (at least). This portal will contain information like number of subscribers (fixed, mobile), costs of Internet packages, coverage maps for 2G, 3G, 4G and fibre, some quality of service analysis in terms of graphs and charts, etc. We also plan to collect any papers written about the subject and add them as resources. The portal will be publicly available.
Broadband speed has emerged as the single most commonly cited metric for characterizing the quality of broadband offerings (according to Bauer, Clark & Lehr, 2010). Speed is not the only factor that attracts consumers to a broadband service, but there are other factors like price and quality. Overall, if we want the Internet to be healthy, we need to know how we are performing.
Measuring broadband performance increases market transparency as it gives consumers choice before purchasing a service, helps providers to improve and regulators to have better policy while ensuring better service delivery.
We are looking for anyone interested in Internet performance, network engineers, people good at data analysis and data visualisation to make sense of test results, web designers, people interested in Internet access issues, other professionals interested in the subject matter and end users. Please look at the CONTRIBUTING.md on details on how you can contribute and a list of contributors.
We also created a Gitter chat room. Feel free to reach out through this link.
Take a look at these resources:
- Open Canvas to give you an overview of the project
- Project Roadmap
- Project Code of Conduct
- Project maintenance
The project is licensed under the MIT license for software/code related content and CC-BY-4.0 for non-software/code related content. See details here.
Sarah is a 2017/18 Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow hosted by Research ICT Africa in Cape Town, South Africa. She is a technologist who loves everything open source.
The project is supervised by Enrico Calandro. During the Mozilla Open Leadership training, the project was mentored by Bonface Ochieng. Guidance from Steve Song is also much appreicated.
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Interested? Please feel free to contribute to the project and reach out on email: sarahk(at)mozillafoundation(dot)org or skiden(at)gmail(dot)com.
Looking forward to engaging with you and to your contribution/ideas to make this project even better. Let's make the Internet better, one measurement at a time.
Welcome! 👏🏾 🎉 🎊
Join us at the Mozilla's Global Sprint May 10-11, 2017! We'll be gathering in-person at sites around the world and online to collaborate on this project and learn from each other. Get your #mozsprint tickets now!
