Having met on one of the information portals a video with a title of approximate content “The speed of Internet access in Madagascar is higher than in France, Canada and the UK,” which I was genuinely surprised to hide. One has only to recall that the island state of Madagascar, unlike the aforementioned northern countries, is geographically located on the very outskirts of the not too prosperous continent - Africa. At the same time, the economic situation in the country sets anti-records, which also does not explain such an intriguing statement about the high achievements of the African Republic in terms of network access standards.
The homeland of those same “meme” lemurs, almost the only place in the world where they are still unsuccessfully fighting the pneumonic plague pandemic, a country of amazing baobabs, hopeless poverty and high-speed Internet? Is this statement true, or are we witnessing another example of "fake news"? Further in the article, we will try to figure out how things are with the Internet in the island of Madagascar.
According to the islanders, according to one method of calculation, are the poorest people on Earth. About 77.6% of the population lives on less than $1.9 a day. The latter circumstance makes it clear why the island is still unsuccessfully trying to overcome about which the rest of the world has already managed to forget. The country, having increased its population from 5 million in 1960 to 27 million in 2019, while being in the center of a political and economic storm, has outstripped most countries of the "Old World" in terms of high-speed Internet availability, where's the catch? And he, as it turns out, is, but first things first.
Not so long ago, the world was introduced one non-governmental organization. According to this methodology, the Republic of Madagascar really ranked 22nd among the world countries in terms of Internet speed, thus ahead of many very successful "colleagues", including the aforementioned Great Britain, Canada, France, as well as most post-Soviet countries.
For all its equidistance from the recognized centers of IT infrastructure, the island of Madagascar has several fairly "wide" Internet channels to the world. This was facilitated by pan-African informatization projects of the continent. Thanks to the rather cheap and reliable, at least from the point of view of safety in an economically and politically unstable region, underwater highways, which, bypassing Africa, simply could not pass by Madagascar, already in 2010, one of the poorest countries in the world received an optical fiber with a bandwidth at 10 Tbps. In addition, the close proximity to the most economically developed country of the continent - South Africa, made it possible for Madagascar to also unwittingly become a transit point in the lines of communication of the IT infrastructure between the Republic of South Africa and the rather distant Southeast Asia, with its technological potential and all the ensuing positive consequences for connectivity in the island republic.
Yes, this is all good, but in comparison with the countries of Western Europe, surrounded not only by submarine cables (in the case of the UK), but also by an endless number of overland fiber-optic lines, this is all small in the eye. The situation becomes clearer when we look at the following picture. network access services in the countries mentioned above.
At the same time, according to , the proportion of the population covered by the Internet for Madagascar is only 7%, which in absolute terms is less than 2 million active users, against almost 80 million in Germany (ranked 25th in the speed rating) or just over 60 million in France (23rd place ) and the UK (35th place).
The situation is indeed somewhat curious. At , through a leased line, in Madagascar at $66.64, this service remains an unaffordable luxury for the vast majority of the population. After all, even those 7% of the lucky ones who can afford to be on the World Wide Web using low-speed 2G networks, or dial-up technologies, will not be able to create a tangible load on the existing highways that communicate this amazing island full of contrasts.
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Source: habr.com