Assessment of Uganda's internet Ecosystem through internet measurements.

Abstract

Internet connectivity has proved to be beneficial to the end users in terms of economic, educational and social opportunities as well as health, which has increased the number of Ugandans accessing the Internet. Unfortunately, information about the Internet connectivity topology between the different Autonomous Systems (AS) in Uganda is limited and only known to the ASes themselves and a few people. Therefore, few people are aware of the source and destination of the information they are accessing over the Internet and the paths this information takes as it is traversing through the Internet. In order to reveal the topological information about the connectivity of ASes in Uganda such as latency, Internet measurement campaigns need to be intensified and the number of vantage points where this information can be captured need to be increased. This research aimed at carrying out Internet measurements on ASes in Uganda focusing on five ASes. The research analysed the Internet paths between the different ASes in Uganda and key selected points across the world. The data collected was supplemented by additional data from Centre for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), Reseaux IP Europeens (RIPE) Atlas and Measurement Lab (M-Lab). The results from the research indicate that Kenya plays a vital role in providing access to the undersea cables at the East African coast to Ugandan Internet Service Providers (ISPs). It is observed from the results that the Uganda Internet eXchange Point (UIXP) promoted local peering and reduced latency towards access to Google services. The results further demonstrate the dominance of companies outside of Uganda hosting government websites and most of the popular websites in Uganda in 2018. This is counter to principles in the Data Protection and Privacy Act which became law in 2019. However, this trend changed in 2020 where most of the Ministries Departments Agencies (MDA) websites where hosted in Uganda. It was further noted that .ug domain name server hosted in Uganda had the lowest query time as compared to name servers hosted outside of the country.