New E. Coast of Africa Fibre

Introduction

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.

Results

One would expect with the use of a terrestial fibre rather than a geo-stationary satellite that the minimum RTT woud be reduced form >=40ms to 200-300ms as seen from the US. Also the reduced congestion enabled by tye higher spee links should make the average RTT more stabe and reduce the packet loss. Below are show the average RTTs and lesses from SLAC on the West Coast of the US and various hosts on the East Coast of Africa.

It is apparent we do not observe any dramtic reduction in RTT on July 23rd. We also looked at the PingER recorded RTT from ICTP Trieste, Italy to a host in Tanzani in case the routes from SLAC were still using satellite while those in Italy were not.

Again there is no dramatic reduction.

According to the BBC report five institutions are already benefiting from the faster speeds - national electricity company Tanesco, communications company, TTCL, Tanzania Railways and the Universities of Dar es Salaam and Dodoma. we also heard from Alem who was visiting Kenyata University from Ethiopia for a one day conefernce that "You can get conected and download data like what you can do in Europe."

From SLAC, we pinged hosts at each of these organizations, the Round Trip Time (RTT) results in msec. are shown below: For the # pings with an asterisk the host did not respond to pings so we used synack to prob the web server:

The host www.tanesco.com is probably a proxy located somewhere in the Western US. The other hosts all have minimum RTTs of well over 400ms which indicates they are probably still using a geo-stationary satellite.

We also looked at the RTT seen from ICTP in Trieste to a couple