Monitoring the Digital Divide

It is increasingly important to support the large numbers of scientistsworking in remote areas and having low -bandwidth access to the Internet. Thiswill continue to be the case for years to come since there is evidence fromPingER performance measurements that the, so-called, digital divide is notdecreasing. In this work, we review the collaborative work of The Abdus SalamInternational Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste -a leadingorganization promoting science dissemination in the developing world- and SLACin Stanford, to monitor by PingER, Universities and Research Institutions allover the developing world following the recent Recommendations of Trieste tohelp bridge the digital divide. As a result, PingER's deployment now covers thereal-time monitoring of worldwide Internet performance and, in particular, Westand Central Africa for the first time. We report on theresults from the ICTPsites and quantitatively identify regions with poor performance, identifytrends, discuss experiences and future work.