It is well known that internet infrastructure deployment is progressing at a rapid pace in the African continent. A flurry of recent research has quantified this, highlighting the expansion of its underlying connectivity network. However, improving the infrastructure is not useful without appropriately provisioned services to exploit it. This article measures the availability and utilisation of web infrastructure in Africa. Whereas others have explored web infrastructure in developed regions, we shed light on practices in developing regions. To achieve this, we apply a comprehensive measurement methodology to collect data from a variety of sources. We first focus on Google to reveal that its content infrastructure in Africa is, indeed, expanding. That said, we find that much of its web content is still served from the US and Europe, despite being the most popular website in many African countries. We repeat the same analysis across a number of other regionally popular websites to find that even top African websites prefer to host their content abroad. To explore the reasons for this, we evaluate some of the major bottlenecks facing content delivery networks (CDNs) in Africa. Amongst other factors, we find a lack of peering between the networks hosting our probes, preventing the sharing of CDN servers, as well as poorly configured DNS resolvers. Finally, our mapping of middleboxes in the region reveals that there is a greater presence of transparent proxies in Africa than in Europe or the US. We conclude the work with a number of suggestions for alleviating the issues observed.

中文翻译：

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探索和分析非洲网络生态系统

众所周知，互联网基础设施的部署正在非洲大陆快速推进。最近的一系列研究已经量化了这一点，强调了其底层连接网络的扩展。但是，如果没有适当配置的服务来利用它，改进基础设施是没有用的。这篇文章衡量了可用性和利用率网络基础设施在非洲。虽然其他人已经探索了发达地区的网络基础设施，但我们阐明了发展中地区的实践。为实现这一目标，我们采用全面的测量方法从各种来源收集数据。我们首先关注谷歌，以揭示其在非洲的内容基础设施确实在扩张。也就是说，我们发现它的大部分网络内容仍然来自美国和欧洲，尽管它是许多非洲国家最受欢迎的网站。我们对许多其他地区流行的网站重复相同的分析，发现即使是非洲顶级网站也更愿意将其内容托管在国外。为了探究其原因，我们评估了非洲内容交付网络 (CDN) 面临的一些主要瓶颈。除其他因素外，我们发现托管我们的探测器的网络之间缺乏对等互连，从而阻止了 CDN 服务器的共享，以及配置不当的 DNS 解析器。最后，我们对该地区中间盒的映射表明，非洲的透明代理比欧洲或美国的存在更多。我们在工作结束时提出了一些减轻所观察到的问题的建议。