Quantifying and Mapping the Digital Divide from an Internet Point of View

Quantitative knowledge of the magnitude, extent and trends of the Digital Divide are critical to understand and identify the regions most in need of help, to make rational decisions on how to address the problems and to make cases for executives, funding agencies and politicians. We report on a project (PingER) to measure the Digital Divide from the point of view of Internet performance. The PingER project has been measuring Internet performance since 1995 and with the increased emphasis on measuring and tracking the Digital Divide, it now covers over 700 hosts in over 150 countries that between them contain over 99% of the world's Internet connected population. In this paper we will describe the how PingER works, it deployment, the data analysis, and presentation. We also introduce a new PingER visualization tool (ViPER) that provides a more appealing interactive visualization of the PingER data and also works on mobile PDAs. We will also show results from PingER that illustrate the magnitude, extent and trends for the Digital Divide, and also compare PingER results with some human development and technology indices