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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.
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.
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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