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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.

Current State

The minimum RTTs measured from SLAC to African countries in August 2009 is seen below. On the right is seen a map of the over 165 sites that PingER monitors in 50 countries in Africa. The red dots indicate PinGER monitoring sites, the blue are beacon sites that are monmitored by all monitoring sites, and the green are other sites monitored by at least one monitoring site.

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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 addition 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 Alliance. The map below shows the state of African NRENs in 2008 and to the right of it the Founding Ubuntuntunet Ubuntunet Alliance members and those who have joined since the founding.

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