Monitoring the Digital Divide

It is increasingly important to support the large numbers of scientists working in remote areas and having low- bandwidth access to the Internet. This will continue to be the case for years to come since there is evidence from PingER performance measurements that the, so-called, digital divide is not decreasing. In this work, we review the collaborative work of The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste -a leading organization promoting science dissemination i developing world- and SLAC in Stanford, to monitor by PingER, Universities and Research Institutions all over the developing world following the recent "Recommendations of Trieste" to help bridge the digital divide. As a result, PingER's deployment now covers the real-time monitoring of worldwide Internet performance and, in particular, West and Central Africa for the first time. We report on the results from the ICTP sites and quantitatively identify regions with poor performance, identify trends, discuss experiences and future work. 1. OVERVIEW 1 A large community of scientists from developing countries cannot or can only partially participate or benefit from electronic science due to the lack of adequate network capacity or performance and awareness about alternatives. This can adversely affect both individual scientists and large international collaborations such as those in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP), where typically about 10% of the collaborating sites are in developing countries. To assist in making information available to scientists worldwide a multidisciplin ary group of international experts gathered for an open round table on "Developing Country Access to On-line Scientific Publishing: Sustainable Alternatives" in October 2002 at t he Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy (1). The meeting was sponsored