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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 had 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, 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 organizationAlliance. The map below shows the state of African NRENs in 2008.
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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