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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. 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. The minimum RTTs measured from SLAC to African countries in August 2009 is seen below.
<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="4d8020fe-e6c7-42ce-b0bf-617ba9ccdb39"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[ | MinRTT from SLAC - Aug. 2009 [[xls | ^map-africa-minrtt-aug2009.xls]] | ]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro> |
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The striking number of countries in Eastern Africa with minimum RTTs of >400ms is indicative that they were using geo-stationary satellite links. The new cable should also result in less jitter due to the reduction in congestion caused by the increase in capacity..
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