Nick Feamster presented a keynote talk on networking research revolutions, from packet switching to software-defined networking, at the CoNext conference in Santa Barbara.  The talk included the following highlights:

• Normal science vs. revolutionary science
• Two important revolutions: packet switching, and control-data plane separation
• Methods for starting your own research revolution

The keynote talk was based on material that Feamster has designed for an “Intro to the Ph.D.” course he teaches a Georgia Tech.

Slides of the talk are available here.

Marshini Chetty presented our paper “Measuring Broadband Performance in South Africa” to the 4th ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (DEV).  The paper includes several new and important findings, including:

• Fixed and mobile throughput does not achieve the rates advertised by ISPs (in contrast to countries such as the US, where performance more closely matches advertised rates).
• Mobile throughput is consistently higher than fixed-line (e.g., DSL) throughput, although both throughput and latency are considerable more variable on mobile providers.
• Latency to other destinations on the African continent can be quite high, due to Internet routes that “detour” through Internet exchange points (IXPs) in Europe (e.g., Amsterdam Internet exchange, London Internet exchange).

We are now in the process of repeating this study in other African countries, in collaboration with Research ICT Africa and Google.