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Introduction

The 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 . See - as reported by the BBC and CNN reports. Such a cable should dramatically reduce the cost of bandwidth measured in $/Mbps, and   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 Round Trip Times (RTT) RTTs to countries of Africa as seen from SLAC National Accelerator Center near San Francisco. Even though we did not observe dramatic changes in performance, yet we believe that a significant impact will be observed once more and more customers e.g academia and commercial organizations subscribe to the service.

PingER monitors over 165 sites in 50 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.

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The minimum RTTs measured from SLAC to African countries in August 2009 is seenin the m.ap are seen in the map on the right

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