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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. On the right is seen a map of the sites that PingER monitors in Africa. The red dots indicate PinGER monitoring sites, the blue are beacon sites taht are monmitored by all monitoring sites, and the green are other sites monitored by at least one monitoring site.
<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="8eb6cc7bcc4d0392-3b754692-44c848be-80bd999a-8e6767d754cc9e0925642970"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[ | MinRTT from SLAC - Aug. 2009 [[xls | ^map-africa-minrtt-aug2009.xls]] | PingER Coverage in Africa | ]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro> |
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The striking number of countries in Eastern and Central Africa with minimum RTTs of >400ms is indicative that they were using geo-stationary satellite links. The new cable should also result in less loss and jitter due to the reduction in congestion caused by the increase in capacity.
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