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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.
This is not the only cable being constructed to Africa. The map below shows the various fibres either in place or under construction.
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At the moment the SAT-3/WASC/ fibre has been in place and connects up several countries on the W. Coast of Africa.
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.
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