Our experience has been that the bandwidth makes little difference. It has a lot more to do about the latency and how users are able to access it. In Zambia, some traffic goes through VSAT while in some cases it is router through a fiber connection. In both cases, the traffic get routed through London however. Ideally, you would wan to avoid a trans-Atlantic hop (i.e. with a server located in America) as usually the latency is much longer, and the connection therefore seems to be much slower. If you can physically locate the server in Nigeria, this may be better, but we have also seen situations were ISPs route information first to London and then to Zambia. So just because the server is local, does not always mean it is faster. This of course is not ideal, but it can happen. So, if you can perform a traceroute from your clients to see where most of them are coming from, and how they are able to reach the ISP with the lowest level of latency, then this should result in a seemingly faster connection.
Of course, you must have a reasonable bandwidth, but normally you are going to be constrained by the downstream bandwidth of the client, and not the upstream bandwidth of the server. This is normally why the latency is much more important than the upstream bandwidth of the server. However, locating servers in location with very low upstream bandwidth (say less than 1 MBit/sec), then you are definitely going to feel that the connection is slower. Most ISPs have upstream bandwidth much greater than that figure, so you would not want to choose any ISP which offers 64kb/sec contested bandwidth upstream, even if the latency is small.
So, in summary, based on our experience here, it is a combination of several factors 1) Server speed 2) Latency 3) Server upstream bandwidth. Since we are using a London based ISP however here, the third factor has never ever been an issue however.
Please what will you recommend as minimum internet speed for most users(download and upload) for online deployments of dhis2 . I would appreciate experiences from developing countries.
Our experience has been that the bandwidth makes little difference. It has a lot more to do about the latency and how users are able to access it. In Zambia, some traffic goes through VSAT while in some cases it is router through a fiber connection. In both cases, the traffic get routed through London however. Ideally, you would wan to avoid a trans-Atlantic hop (i.e. with a server located in America) as usually the latency is much longer, and the connection therefore seems to be much slower. If you can physically locate the server in Nigeria, this may be better, but we have also seen situations were ISPs route information first to London and then to Zambia. So just because the server is local, does not always mean it is faster. This of course is not ideal, but it can happen. So, if you can perform a traceroute from your clients to see where most of them are coming from, and how they are able to reach the ISP with the lowest level of latency, then this should result in a seemingly faster connection.
Of course, you must have a reasonable bandwidth, but normally you are going to be constrained by the downstream bandwidth of the client, and not the upstream bandwidth of the server. This is normally why the latency is much more important than the upstream bandwidth of the server. However, locating servers in location with very low upstream bandwidth (say less than 1 MBit/sec), then you are definitely going to feel that the connection is slower. Most ISPs have upstream bandwidth much greater than that figure, so you would not want to choose any ISP which offers 64kb/sec contested bandwidth upstream, even if the latency is small.
So, in summary, based on our experience here, it is a combination of several factors 1) Server speed 2) Latency 3) Server upstream bandwidth. Since we are using a London based ISP however here, the third factor has never ever been an issue however.
Please what will you recommend as minimum internet speed for most users(download and upload) for online deployments of dhis2 . I would appreciate experiences from developing countries.