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. This should enable the improved performance (increased bandwidth, reduced Round trip Times (RTT), and less congestion and thus jitter.

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.

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.

It is apparent we do not observe any dramatic reduction in RTT on July 23rd. We also looked at the PingER recorded RTT from ICTP Trieste, Italy to a host in Tanzania in case the routes from SLAC were still using satellite while those from Italy were not. We also looked at the RTT seen from a TENET host in cape Town South Africa to a host in Mozambique. In this case (see below) the RTTs have long been << 400ms so they already were not using geostationary satellite to connect the sites.

Again there is no dramatic reduction. looking at the TENET to www.micti.co.mz RTTs it is apparent that there is a direct (non geo-stationary) satellite connection between the two sites since the RTT << 400ms.

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 conference that "You can get connected 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 probe 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.

When looking at the lack of effects seen initially following the fibre install it is important to understand the caveats.

To enable easier selection and looking for changes for these East African Coastal countries, we added a PingER affinity group (E.AFRICA_COAST) for hosts monitored in Kenya, Mozambique and Kenya. The minimum RTT should be very sensitive to a change in the route from a geo-stationary satellite to a terrestrial fibre link. An example of selecting data sensitive to the E. African fibre connection can be seen in the table of PingER daily minimum RTT data for the group E.AFRICA_COAST. This data is updated daily.

Adding Extra Hosts

We received suggestions from Don Riley of UMD:

I would be watching kdn.co.ke, kenet.or.ke in Kenya. maybe also Univ. of Nairobi.
KDN should change soon, since they're connecting directly to SEACOM and lighting fiber to Uganda and Rwanda. KENET should be first on the university side, I think. and Univ. of Nairobi - typical for lead univ. in capitol to come up first. Similar in TZ and MZ, but looks like you've got the right lead univ's there. Would probably track MORENET and TERNET there.

We have been monitoring kdn.co.ke so we will have a nice history and see the change.

Kenet.or.ke does not respond to pings, using synack the response time to its web server (kenet.or.ke:80) on 7/25/09 was about 667ms.

For the University of Nairobi I Googled it and got www.uonbi.ac.ke however it has an RTT of 78ms from SLAC and appears to be in Virginia USA. Instead I added library.uonbi.ac.ke that is a University of Nairobi host that appears to be in Nairobi. On 7/25/09 it had an RTT of ~ 658ms.

I googled MORENET Mozambique and came up with morenet.mct.gov.mz. However it does not respond to pings. It does respond to synack on port 80 (www) and the response time to a trivial request is ~368ms so it may have already moved over. However GeoIPTool (see http://www.geoiptool.com/en/?IP=morenet.mct.gov.mz) says it's in Buenos Aires which I do not believe. Visualroute's (at http://visualroute.visualware.com/) tests fail. Looking at the traceroute from SLAC and using GeoIPTool to locate the nodes , it appears that on leaving the US the route goes directly from the West Coast of the US (Sunnyvale) through Buenos Aires (node telkomsa.ge9-16.br02.ldn01.pccwbtn.net 152ms) then to Pretoria (rrba-ip-lir-1-pos-1-0-4.telkom-ipnet.co.za 352 ms) and then to Mozambique. This it is not currently using the new fibreoptic cable running South down the E. African coast. Looking at a map of the world's undersea fibre cables in the region may help explain this.

I have added www.ternet.or.tz on 7/25/09 it had a ping RTT of 705ms.

Further Results

To assist in the selection of hosts in this region from the pingtable results, we created an affinity group that contains all hosts in Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania. This makes it much simpler to look at the minimum RTT for just such hosts for the last few days.

Uganda should be connected soon. KDN was building the fiber to Uganda and Rwanda. We therefore also set up a group for countries in the UN definition of Eastern Africa to simplify reviewing minimum RTT for all East Africa.