- Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs) are reliant on their neighbors for Internet connectivity.
- This reliance is one of multiple factors that affect a country’s Internet resilience.
- Understanding the resilience of critical Internet infrastructure can help LLDCs and other countries reliant on terrestrial fibre connections.
Subsea fiber cables form the backbone of the Internet, carrying around 95% of intercontinental Internet traffic. Connecting directly to these cables, preferably more than one at different landing stations, can dramatically improve a country’s Internet speeds and overall Internet resilience. As such, it has become a priority for all coastal and island nations.
Unfortunately, 45 landlocked countries worldwide do not have this option, and they rely on terrestrial fiber cables to connect them to nearby coastal landing stations in their neighboring countries. Although cross-border terrestrial networks provide exceptional performance, their maintenance and subsequent performance, security, and resilience are reliant on the governments and cable operators of neighboring countries to which they connect.
Situations like these are not new for landlocked countries in that they’ve needed to form strong relationships with their neighbors to access telecommunication and land transportation routes to coastlines and ports as well as access to water and power. However, they are challenging nevertheless and contribute to more than two-thirds of landlocked countries being considered by the UN as developing (so-called Landlocked Developing Countries or LLDCs), 17 of which are considered least developed. (View chart)
Therefore, developing a resilient Internet ecosystem is critical for LLDCs. This will enable local Internet users to affordably and reliably access local and international government, educational, health, financial, and commercial opportunities.
Two-thirds of LLDCs Have Lower Internet Resilience Than Neighbors
If we plot Pulse’s Internet Resilience Index to a world map, we can see that many (n=12) of the 32 classified LLDCs (highlighted) have lower Internet resilience than their neighbors. (View chart)
Around two-thirds (n=22) have lower IRI scores than the average of their neighboring countries. Bolivia, Burundi, Lao PDR, Niger, Northern Macedonia, and Tajikistan have the least resilient Internet compared to the average resilience of their neighbors. (Lesotho and Eswatini are also in the bottom eight, but only because they (only) have one very resilient neighbor, South Africa.) (View chart)
Of the ten countries with higher IRI scores than the average of their neighbors, two—Uzbekistan and Bhutan—have the highest IRI scores, and another four—Armenia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda—have the second-highest IRI scores compared to their neighbors. (View chart)
Keeping Traffic Local Reduces Reliance on International Transit
One way that countries can reduce the associated risk from cable cuts outside their borders is to store popular content, including e-government and e-health services within their country or region. The added benefit of ‘caching’ content locally is that it can shorten routes between the content and the end user, making it easier to provide more affordable, reliable, and faster Internet access.
The chart below shows that Internet users in a significant number of LLDCs (n=15), of which eight are Least Developed LLDCs (black), can access 50% or more of their top 1,000 most popular web services through an in-country server or cache.
Read: 50/50 Vision to Keep Internet Traffic Local, Efficient, and Cost-effective
Mapping Terrestrial Cable Infrastructure Provides Further Clues
This year, the Internet Society has assumed the secretarial role of the Open Fiber Data Standard (OFDS), integrating it under its Internet Insights and Innovation program.
Established in 2022, the OFDS initiative provides a standardized way of describing terrestrial fiber optic networks to streamline the process of making sense of the data and enable public and private sector stakeholders to make data-driven decisions. For example:
- Infrastructure and network providers can use data to avoid overbuilding, reduce commercial risk, and identify existing networks to connect to.
- Data can be used by academics, researchers, and policy analysts to understand the economic and/or social impact of investing in fiber infrastructure.
- National statistics offices, regulatory agencies, and inter-governmental organizations can use data to calculate internationally agreed indicators.
- Government, private, and multi-lateral investors can use data to identify opportunities to invest in fiber infrastructure.
- Non-governmental organizations can use data to advocate for improved Internet access.
Learn about the OFDS
The project’s focus in 2025 will be to advance a sustainable approach to the standard’s development, adoption, support, governance, and maintenance. To this end, we will conduct a series of outreach and standard-development activities to raise awareness of the initiative and recruit support and implementors.
Email us at pulse.isoc.org if you’re interested in hosting or attending a workshop or having us present on the project.
We will eventually include data related to submarine and terrestrial cable resilience in our Pulse Country Reports. In the meantime, tell your own data-driven Internet resilience stories using the Pulse API.
Photo: Satelite image of Central Asia by Merikanto, VIA Wikimedia Commons
