New E. Coast of Africa Fibre

R. Les. Cottrell, SLAC and Umar Kalim SEECS/NUST

Introduction

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 by using shorter distance terrestrial routes, and by increasing the capacity reduce 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.

PingER monitors over 165 sites in 50 African countries, that contain about 99% of Africa's population. The African countries that are not currently monitored are Chad, Comoros, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome & Principe and Western Sahara. The results from PingER are used heavily in this study. Below is seen a map of the PingER sites in Africa. The red dots indicate PinGER monitoring sites, the blue are beacon sites that are monitored by most of the over 40 PingER monitoring sites around the world, and the green are other sites monitored by at least one monitoring site.

This study first outlines the new submarine fibres coming into place for E. Africa. It goes on to summarize the current state and trends of Internet performance for Africa and the costs particularly for Sub_Saharan and E. Africa. Following this we discuss the role of the emerging National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and traffic routing. Then we look at the RTTs of hosts in Kenya and Tanzania on the day following the start of operation of the Seacom cable, the identification of further hosts of interest, followed by the changes in RTTs as hosts later moved their routing from satellite to terrestrial routes.

Submarine Fibre Cables for E. Africa

At the moment the SAT-3/WASC/SAFE fibre has been in place for some time and connects up several countries on the W. Coast of Africa. Up until now however, there have been no fibres on the East 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 EASSY 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. Maps of the various fibres is shown below and more details are available here.

For the interior backbones (or backhauls) associated with these landing points, see here.

Current State of the African Internet

The throughputs measured to Africa from N. America for the last decade are shown below in the left hand figure. It is seen that not only do African sites lag the rest of the world in throughput, being roughly in the state that European sites were over a decade and a half ago, but also they are falling further behind with time. Further, bear in mind that for Africa, Mediterranean countries and South Africa have the better perfomance and E. Africa is the worst off (see the the left map below).  Thus the arrival of a terrestrial submarine fibre cable link to the rest of the world for E. Africa is a very significant development.

The minimum RTTs measured from SLAC to African countries in August 2009 are seen in the map on the right

The striking number of countries in Eastern and Central Africa with minimum RTTs of >400ms is indicative that they were using GEO-Stationary (GEOS)satellite links.

East Africa contains 300M people, yet less than 3% are Internet users (see Internet usage for Africa). Bandwidth in Africa is very expensive. See for example the left hand figure below where it is seen that bandwidth costs for broadband in Sub-Saharan Africa are 30-40 times that in the US. Taken together with the earnings differences, what takes say 15% of a US Gross National Income (GNI) per capita will take over 800% of a Sub-Saharan GNI per capita.

Emergence of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) & Routing

In the past the area has had poor Internet connectivity with heavy use of expensive (in terms of $/Mbps) geostationary satellite connections to the outside world. (see above)  In addition most of the traffic between countries made use of expensive international links via Europe and the U.S. rather than more direct connections. There are active movements to create National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in the area, see for example "Sub-Saharan Africa: An update" by Boubaker Barry. This,  together with direct connections between countries will enable more direct peering. These NRENs in turn are peering with the GEANT network in Europe through the Ubuntunet Alliance. The map below shows the state of African NRENs in 2008 and to the right of it the Founding Ubuntunet Alliance members and those who have joined since the founding.

It can be seen that NRENs are being created.

To understand the importance of NRENs and IXPs to reduce the use of intercontinental providers to get between African countries, we can look at the state of direct connections between African countries by measuring the traceroutes within Africa. Below on the left and in the middle are the routes taken from South Africa to other African countries in September 2005 and August 2009 and on the right the routes from Burkina Faso to other African countries in August 2009. In the middle map countries which were only accessible by satellite have horizontal shading lines.

In September 2005 most traffic from South Africa to the rest of Africa took costly international links, only Botswana and Zimbabwe had direct routes. The situation has improved recently as direct routes from South Africa to Namibia and Botswana were added. More details on the routes to African countries from several measurement points around the world measured in Spring 2009 can be seen in a spreadsheet of African routing and inferences.

Connections from Burkina Faso in August 2009 were direct to only Senegal, Mali, and Benin (in green).  Most other countries in grey were reached by intercontintal connections via Europe, followed by many in teal that go via Europe and N. America. Somalia was reached via Europe, N. and S. America. Burundi was reached via Europe, N. America and E. Asia.

Initial Results on First Day

One would expect with the use of a terrestial fibre rather than a geo-stationary satellite that the minimum RTT woud be reduced from >=400ms 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. These are all measured using the PingER project's data.

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.

We also added some hosts in Somalia.

Steve Song pointed out that a good PingER point would be the Durban University of Technology. They are the only university in South Africa to be currently connected to Seacom. All the rest are waiting for the development of the national SANREN backbone, later this year. I added www.dut.ac.za to the list of hosts monitored by PingER on 8/6/09. We will look to see whether we can see differences between it and other hosts monitored in South Africa.

Later Results Illustrating Impact of Changes

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.

On Aug 2, 2009 following an email from Don Riley who had detected that kdn.co.ke had dropped to 370ms. We were Unfortunately not monitoring kdn.co.ke. However on further investigation we found the RTT from SLAC to acheraarchitects.co.ke (see below) had changed between 14:00 and 17:00 hours 6/1/09 GMT from a steady 716 ms to a steady 325ms. This is exactly what one would expect as the route moves from a GEOS to a terrestrial line. The traceroute from SLAC to Kenya went via ESnet to Sunyvale, then via Level3 to New York and London and thence to Kenya. The RTT between London and Kenya was about 200ms.

On Aug 1, 2009 at about 23:00 hours GMT the RTTs averaged over a day, from SLAC to www.ternet.or.tz changed from about 730ms to about 350ms (see below, note that the RTTs are truncated at about 900ms ). After about half a day it reverted back again. The traceroute when the RTT had reverted back to the high RTT value shows the route going through Telia and Newskies, a satellite services provider. The traceroute when the RTT was low was via ESnet to San Jose where it was picked up by Teleglobe to take the traffic to London and thence to Tanzania where it was passed to Tanzania Telecommunications.

On August 3, 15:00 hours www.ku.ac.ke dropped to about 370ms (see below), the earlier step change from 650ms to 550ms may have been since only one direction of the route was using the terrestrial line. The large difference by time of day indicate that there is probably still congestion somewhere in the route. A traceroute after the changeover shows the route going via ESnet to New York and via Level3 onto London, there it is transferred to InterRoute and is carried to Kenya by Seacom and thence to Nairobinet.

On August 3, around 19:00 hours elearning.braeburn.ac.ke dropped from about 750ms to about 400ms (see below).