Throughput from SLAC to different world regions from January 1995 to December 2004.

"The original purpose of PingER was to provide Internet monitoring for the high energy and nuclear physics communities," said Les Cottrell from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, leader of the project. "More recently, as a result of a collaboration with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy and the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, it has been extended and now has an increased emphasis on quantifying the digital divide and understanding the performance of developing regions."

Internet data is broken up and sent in packets, and PingER measures the round trip time to send a packet from one host to another and for the packet to be echoed back and received by the sender. PingER also measures the fraction of packets that are not received back at the sender, called packet loss. Throughput, a measure of the amount of data transferred through Internet connections in a specific amount of time, is then derived from the two measurements.

Measurements from the past decade (see graph) show that the throughput from SLAC to sites in the U.S., Europe, Canada, China, Africa and Latin America is increasing at a rate of almost 50 percent a year, and no one region is increasing faster than the others. The U.S. and Canadian throughputs are highest since the measurements are made from the U.S. Developing regions such as China are several years behind Europe, and Africa, which registers the lowest throughput, shows no sign of catching up. Countries in the Middle East and Central Asia are not even maintaining the same rate of increase, and thus falling farther behind each year. PingER measurements show that the Internet, though a potential instrument to help bridge the digital divide, also has its own divide.

A collaboration that includes SLAC, the NUST Institute of Information Technology in Pakistan and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory currently contributes to the PingER project. Development funding comes from the U.S. State Department and the Pakistan Ministry of Science and Technology. The project's results have attracted the attention of international agencies interested in the digital performance of developing countries, such as the World Bank and the United Nations.

"In the coming year, we plan to increase monitoring from sites in developing regions such as Pakistan, India, South Africa, Brazil and Russia," said Cottrell. "We also plan to develop improved management tools that will assure a better quality of data; improved visualization and presentation of the data, including interactive world maps showing different sites; and easier installation of the PingER toolkit for new monitoring sites."

Learn more at the PingER project Web site.