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The Seacom undersea fibre optic cable plugging East Africa into high speed Internet went live Thursday July 23, 2009. See the BBC and CNN reports. This should enable the improved performance (increased bandwidth, reduced Round trip Times (RTT), and less congestion and thus jitter.
This is not the only cable being constructed to Africa. The map below shows the various fibres either in place or under construction.
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At the moment the SAT-3/WASC/ fibre has been in place for some time and connects up several countries on the W. Coast of Africa. The Seacom line is not the only fiber-optic cable project on Africa's east coast — others include the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable Systems (EASSY), The East African Marine System (TEAMS) and Lion — but it will be the longest and have highest capacity (1.28 terabytes per second). The Eastern Africa Submarine Cable Systems and TEAMS are designed to build out African telecommunications networking, but Seacom is the only line that directly will connect east coast urban areas in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania to France and India. TEAMS landed in Mombasa early June 2009 and is currently undergoing testing while EASSY and Lion are expected to be operational by mid-2010. A map of the various fibres is shown below and more details are available here.
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Initial Results
One would expect with the use of a terrestial fibre rather than a geo-stationary satellite that the minimum RTT woud be reduced from >=40ms to 200-300ms as seen from the US. Also the reduced congestion enabled by the higher speed links should make the average RTT more stable and reduce the packet loss. Below are shown the average RTTs and losses from SLAC on the West Coast of the US to various hosts on the East Coast of Africa.
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