Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect Procedia Computer Science 107 (2017) 64 – 69
International Congress of Information and Communication Technology (ICICT 2017)
Measuring Broadband Internet Performance in Nepal: A Comparative Study Nabin Kumar Karn a, *, Zhang Honglia, Muhammad Shafiqa a
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China * Corresponding author:
[email protected] Tel.: +86-451-86413309-
Abstract Broadband Internet performance either Fixed or Wireless has not been studied in details from the view of customer; though, broadband internet savors wide penetration in Nepal. Till now to the best of our knowledge that no independent analysis has been carry out that expose the end-user's experience in Nepal. That famine of knowledge is upsetting as benchmarking broadband internet performance that is essentially crucial for consumers of Nepal due to its large souk. To fill that empty, we accomplished a preliminary investigation of both broadband (fixed landlines and fixed wireless) internet links in Nepal throughout host-based using the speedtest.net and speedof.me. Accuracy of host-based is not as high as router-based due to several factors, although it gives the glimpse of broadband performance. Our findings indicating that the customers in Nepal are not reaching proclaimed speeds; wireless broadband internet convinces proclaimed performance tied up better than wired broadband internet in most of cases. Often high latencies play significant performance bottlenecks to destination. Rich peering between different ISPs and investing in local server infrastructure will create a noteworthy difference in getting better experience of internet for consumers in Nepal. Keywords: Broadband Performance; Broadband measurement; Nepal; policy; Host based
1. Introduction Modern era is the age of Internet, and it is an essential part of human life. Broadband Internet access and adoption is crucial to seizing the full benefits of the information society and Nepal can't be exceptional. Broadband internet connectivity in Nepal is booming, although, the country's broadband internet performance data are available in pocket size. Previously some studies1,2 have been conducted to measure the fixed and wireless broadband internet performance in developed countries (i.e. UK, USA) as well as also in developing country ( i.e.in South Africa) to demonstrate the contrast and seen some utter difference in connectivity between developed regions and developing country. In that research, number of ISPs providing either fixed or wireless do not achieve advertised rates which
1877-0509 © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 7th International Congress of Information and Communication Technology doi:10.1016/j.procs.2017.03.057
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are the bitter truth of developing countries. In our study, our motive is to re-investigate some of the question in context of broadband provider in Nepal which is least developing country. Presently, in Nepal, several bodies are there like regulatory bodies, Internet Service Provider association, broadband users, but none of any one organization has access to do assessment of broadband networks quality from the view of end users. Inform the users about value of money3, better data is required; moreover, if the performance does not meet up standards helps to decline the broadband usage 4,5 appearing in and an associated to the senility of the nation's development indicators6. Our primary goal is to do the assessment broadband internet quality or connectivity in Nepal. The data we collected could support better information to make suitable policy-making and investment in this region7,8,9, besides that also provide better connection picture which was not explored before. We deal with the following questions in this paper: • Do the broadband users in Nepal either fixed or wireless subscribers achieves ISPs advertise speeds ? • How is the performance consistency that the end users experience over time? •Evaluation of the contributions of the factors such as latency, DNS caching to the end-to-end performance ? The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we talk about our study background and introduce metrics and techniques applied for evaluating broadband Internet performance. We introduce our method to evaluate broadband internet performance contrasting with alternative techniques. Section 3 presents the outcomes of our ongoing swot work endeavouring to benchmark Internet Service Providers across Nepal. Discusses and conclusion of our experiments are presented in section 4. 2. Background and Technique In this chapter, we present a short background about Internet access in Nepal and measurement in details. 2.1 Broadband in Nepal Some facts that show the present position of Internet access in Nepal 10 is shown in table 1. In concise, Nepal's broadband Internet is on the fast track. Broadband technology and higher data rates, both we are considered for broadband. In Nepal, Internet users are around 14 million with penetration rate of 52%. Penetration rate to fixed broadband internet access in Nepal go on to increase steadily from a very tiny base. There are around 30 Internet Service Providers and penetration increased from 0.8 to 0.9 during 2012 to 2014 and 1.2% in 2016. It is predicted that the growth of fixed broadband penetration will reach at least 3.0% by 2021 from the current penetration of 1.2 %. Mobile broadband has seen continues and strongly expand from a relatively little base. Access to mobile broadband has amplified from 17% to 21% from 2014 to 2015 and 25% in 2016 11. Several ways to get broadband which includes fixed line via Asynchronous Digital Subscriber line(ADSL), 3G USB modem,(EVDO), Cable modem, WiMAX(IEEE 802.16e), and FTTH(Fiber to the Home) which put into operation recently 10. Fig.1 shows penetration rate of the various broadband internet providing technologies. According to Nepal Telecommunication Authority (NTA) which releases the monthly MIS report, 55.15 % of internet market share is hold by NDCL 10. Similarly 42.48% by Ncell, 0.46 % by UTL, 0.76 % by STPL and rest is shared among other ISPs. Service plan deployment rates, average pay and cost of broadband in Nepal are shows in Table 2. Unfortunately, in Nepal, evolution of Internet started before the establishing the proper regulatory body. In Nepal, the internet launched in 1993 but the first Telecommunication acts commenced in 1997. Since then several telecommunications and broadband practiced and the recent broad- band policy has come into effect from 2014 12. However, there has been no provision to scrutinize and regulate the quality of broadband. We believe that this study will assist the authorities to draw up new policies for monitoring and regulating ISPs broadband performance. Table 1. Fast Internet Facts About nepal10
Table 2. Tariff and Service plan rate of ISP's
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Fig.1. Different technology penetration rate to access broadband internet in Nepal.
2.2 Measurement Technique and Approaches We seek to yardstick the broadband ISPs in Nepal directly from end user's home gateway. In order to measure broadband performance, several methods and techniques are used. Measurement doing at the place of end user's end is one method. In this type, while the users at end machine ask to download a specific application 13, at same time running web applications measure speed tests for upload and download throughput along with latency. Speedtest.net by Ookla14 is one prominent web application. Content Distribution Services(CDN) like Akamai also performing host based speed tests. Host based measurements are affected by certain limitation which include factors such as the home network environment like home wireless network, interference from multiple users accessing the same uplink, and limitations of the end host. This type of measurements characterize snaps of the that network at the particular time when the measurement was taken and depends on execution which done by users 15. Another measurements technique that distinguishes from host based is measures directly from home gateway router. A router is equipped with special firmware in router based measurement is distributed among users. Users are posed either make it default router or substitute their default router with the custom router. The benefit of router based measurement is that the measurements is possible without any interference from a user and gets continuous measurements because the router is always on and connected. Tests doing by this method generate cleaner and more precise results because home factors that influence measurements are elucidate 16. Since the router kit are costly and hard to purchase and install which is main hindrance of router based measurements in least developing countries like Nepal. For the purposes of this study we selected two different web application speedtest.net and speedof.me. 2.3 Deployment Scenario For this paper reports, we presented the data collected between June 2016 and Sept. 2016 in Nepal and still ongoing our study and data collection work. We collected the data using only host based and in future we will do router based measurements to measure broadband internet performance of fixed line and mobile connectivity using an open source measurement platform which is suitable for the South Asian environment. We hired the users where required using the local website, local e-mail lists, word of mouth, our own local contact network and organization,
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social media sites such as Facebook.com, Twitter.com and messaging app like whatsapp. We were also aware about collecting the data from different part of country as well as from different providers. We mainly focus in this paper on how we have adapted these tools to operate in a developing country, where constraints are different. We conducted the subsequent experiments: upload and download throughput, latency, jitter, DNS resolution time. To measure latency, we carried out latency ping test to Measurement Lab servers around the world. We collected measurements are shown in table 3. 3. Results We now summarize the outcomes of our experiment. First we explore both fixed and wireless broadband internet performance of ISPs, whether they reach the ranks which they advertised to customers. After that, we investigate the uniformity of the performance and the factors which affects performance, such as latency. Lastly, we study scope of various optimizations technique that could improve end-to-end performance such as DNS caching. 3.1 What about throughput matching according to advertised rates? First, we investigate the throughput values that we measured using host based throughput measurements either matched with advertised rate by ISPs to customers. We use normalized throughput for this purpose and shown in fig.2. The majority ISPs not pass to achieve the advertised performance rate that can be seen clearly. As shown by whisker in plot, throughput measurement went over advertised rates in some rare case. 3.2 Measurements of Latency We also examine latencies distribution between measurement servers which is nearby to our vantage points. We also investigated not only the last-mile latencies of each Internet service provider's but also the end-to-end latencies around the world to different destinations. Latencies distributions are shown in figure 3. Despite the latencies generally shows reasonably low variance, there are significant outliers docile latencies that certainly deserve further investigation because almost an order of scale higher than the norm. Fig.3 shows the latency besides local server in Kathmandu to different servers that are placed around the world. Latencies with geographic region do not associate with geographic distance as we saw in fig 3. For example, geographical distance to New Delhi from Kathmandu is only around 1000 Kilometres away where as latency is around 300 ms. On the other hand the distance to London is 6-7 times far away in compare to New Delhi but latency to London is about 200 ms. All the traffic to India is route via Singapore exchange point due to no direct routes to ISPs of India, similar to study done by 1. Table 3. Summary of Measurements
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Fig.2 ISP's Throughput normalized by rate advertised according to service plan (Value of 1 means advertised rate meets the attained Throughput). Results show most of the ISPs fall well below the advertised rates.
Fig.3 Latencies measurement from Kathmandu to around the world
3.3 What other factors affect performance? Now, we investigate how do the factors like DNS caching at local server and time of day affect impact to end-toend performance which user experience. DNS caching queries at local resolver can extensively reduced the time to resolve the DNS queries by an order of magnitude in many cases that we found. Diurnal congestion patterns are well-provisioned in internal to Nepal ,however that overcrowding to International destinations continue striking. DNS caching- To measure the effect of local DNS caching, we issued two queries for the same DNS name in sequence to the Internet service provider's local resolver assuming that the one query will characterize the consequence of an uncached query and other query will provide from the local caching resolver of ISP's. Fig.4 shows the result of DNS caching on broadband internet Performance for cached and uncached queries. Time-of Day Effects- Fig. 5 shows how the latencies fluctuation depends on the time of day. Latency is increases as well as more inconsistent during peak hours that we can see in the results. Latency values fluctuate to both server, but variation is significantly less to local server than International location's server. Effect of Jitter- Jitter measures the unevenness within latency measurements and its values for different broadband ISPs in Nepal are shown in Fig.6. Real time applications such as gaming, VOIP and video conferencing are suffering from high Jitter effects. ISPs having fixed wireless showing higher values with greater variations while ISPs having Wires showing low values.
NDCL C
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Subisu C
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caching DNS(C) versus Non Caching DNS (NC) Fig. 4 DNS caching effects on DNS query resolution time
4. Discussion and Conclusion This paper provides a comparative investigation on broadband Internet performance in Nepal. Investigational results are summarized as, (1) advertised rates not achieving by ISPs; (2) Latency and other factors have significant effects;
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NDCL
Fig 5: Local hour of the day to the Server at GOOGLE DNS mean latency values along with measurement server at Kathmandu
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Fig. 6 Broadband ISP's Jitter Values of Nepal
(3) Due to poor peering by ISP in a region generates oblique directions; and (4) local caching and pre-fetching which are simple optimizations can extensively advance the DNS response time. The above results summarize the condition of broadband internet in Nepal and generate a number of observations to commendation for broadband internet access networks in Nepal, although, we need to perform router based measurement to reach in a concrete planning for future and we are trying to do that. References 1. M. Chetty, S. Sundaresan, S. Muckaden, N. Feamster, and E. Calandro, “Measuring broadband performance in south africa,” in Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development.ACM, 2013, p. 1. 2. Ofcom,UK Broadband Performance May 2012: The Performance of Fixed-Line Broadband Deliveredto UK Residential Consumers. Ofcom, 2012. 3. M. Chetty, R. Banks, A. Brush, J. Donner, and R. Grinter, “You’re capped: understanding the effects of bandwidth caps on broadband use in the home,” in Proc. of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, March 2012, pp. 3021–3030. 4. J. Chen, S. Amershi, A. Dhananjay, and L. Subramanian, “Comparing web interaction models in developing regions,” in Proc. of the First ACM Symposium on Computing for Development. ACM, 2010, p. 6. 5. B. Bilbao-Osorio, S. Dutta, and B. Lanvin, “The global information technology report 2013,” Growth and Jobs in a Hyperconnected World, 2013. 6. S. Sundaresan, N. Magharei, N. Feamster, and R. Teixeira, “Characterizing and mitigating web performance bottlenecks in broadband access networks,” 2013. 7.“Federal Communications Commission, 2012 Measuring Broadband America July Report: A Report on Consumer Wireline Broadband Performance in the U.S. FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology and Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, 2012.” 8.“OFCOM, Measuring Mobile Broadband in the U.K.: performance delivered to PCs via dongles/datacards September to December 2010. OFCOM,, 2011.” 9.“OFCOM, U.K. Broadband Performance May 2012: The Performance of Fixed-Line Broadband Delivered to U.K. Residential Consumers. OFCOM, , 2012.” 10. MIS monthly report published by NTA,"www.nta.gov.np"[online; accessed 20-October-2016]. 11."Internet World states, "http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia.htm #np [online access June-2016] 12.http://www.nta.gov.np/en/public-notice-en/460-broadband-policy,2071 13.S. Bauer, D. Clark, and W. Lehr, “Understanding broadband speed measurements,” MITAS project white paper, 2010. 14. “Ookla,” http://www.ookla.com/, [Online; accessed 22-Oct-2016] 15. I.Canadi, P. Barford, and J. Sommers, “Revisiting broadband performance,” in Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Internet measurement conference. ACM, 2012, pp. 273–286. 16.S. Srikanth, W. De Donato, N. Feamster, R. Teixeira, S. Crawford, and A. Pescape, “Broadband internet performance: a view from the gateway,” in ACM SIFCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol.41, no.4 ACM, 2011, pp. 134-145.