Web content usage behavior: a case study of a university in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study characterizes the behavior of students in one of the Sub-Saharan Africa universities with respect to usage of valuable, but expensive Internet resources in a developing economy. Traffic allocation to web domains was compared with known statistical distributions such as Zipf and Stretched exponential distributions. Observed results show that traffic allocation follows stretched exponential distribution and that students use only small fraction of traffic for actual education activities and the rest of the traffic is associated with video services and social networks. The cumulative results from male and female students’ hostels show gender differences in browsing habits. More importantly, actual usage is at variance with the surveys conducted by OFCOM in UK and those conducted among students at the university, thus showing that usage patterns significantly differ from surveys result and between the users in advanced and developing economies.