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With the 2010 Soccer World Cup fast approaching the Seacom undersea fibre optic cable, plugging East Africa into high speed Internet, went live on Thursday July 23, 2009 - as reported by the BBC and CNN. Such a cable should dramatically reduce the cost of bandwidth measured in $/Mbps,  reduce the Round Trip Times (RTT) from >~ 480 ms for a geostationary satellite, down to 200-350ms (seen from N. America) by using shorter distance terrestrial routes, and . Also by increasing the capacity reduce the congestion and thus the losses and jitter. 

In this case study we look at the current state of Internet access for Africa as measured by the PingER project and also at the effect of the new submarine cable connections on the RTTs to countries of Africa as seen from the SLAC National Accelerator Center near San Francisco. The main effects seen so far are on the RTTs for selected sites that have converted to using the terrestrial links. As the new routes stabilize and more and more customers, e.g academia and commercial organizations, subscribe to the service, we can expect to also see lower losses and jitter and higher through-puts together with a wider impact on deployment.

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