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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. Potentially this can affect a large population
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. Maps of the various fibres is shown below and more details are available here.
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East Africa contains 300M people, yet less than 3% are Internet users (see Internet usage for Africa). In the past the area has poor Internet connectivity with mainly geostationary satellite connections to the outside world. In addtion 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, which together with direct connections between countries will enable more direct peering.
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. These are all measured using the PingER project's data.
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