Introduction
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.
Results
One would expect with the use of a terrestial fibre rather than a geo-stationary satellite thet the minimum RTT woud be reduced form >=40ms to 200-300ms as seen from the US. Also the reduced congestion enabled by tye higher spee links should make the average RTT more stabe and reduce the packet loss. Below are show the average RTTs and lesses from SLAC on teh West Coast of the US and various hosts on the East Coast of Africa.
|
acheraarchitects.co.ke |
loans.co.ke |
elearning.braeburn.ac.ke |
|---|---|---|---|
Kenya |
|
|
|
|
www.micti.co/mz |
www.uem.mz |
|
Mozambique |
|
|
|
|
www.muchs.ac.tc |
www.6telecoms.co.tz |
www.acet.or.tz |
Tanzania |
|
|
|
According to the BBC report five institutions are already benefiting from the faster speeds - national electricity company Tanesco, communications company, TTCL, Tanzania Railways and the Universities of Dar es Salaam and Dodoma.
We pinged hosts at each of these organizations, the results in msec. are shown below: For the # pings with an asterisk the host did not respond to pings so we used synack to prob the web server:
Country |
Organization |
Host |
# pings |
Min RTT |
Avg RTT |
Max RTT |
Std dev |
Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tanzania |
Tanzania railways |
www.trctz.com |
100 |
764 |
790 |
893 |
19.5 |
0% |
Tanzania |
Tanzania Telecommunications Company |
www.ttcl.co.tz |
100* |
714 |
721 |
730 |
4.3 |
1% |
Tanzania |
University of Dar Es Salaam |
www.udsm.ac.tz |
151 |
696 |
711 |
1130 |
45 |
0% |
Tanzania |
University of Dodoma |
www.udom.ac.tz |
100* |
753 |
783 |
845 |
18 |
0% |
Tanzania |
Tanesco National Electric Company |
www.trctz.com |
49 |
12.6 |
12.997 |
13.53 |
0.251 |
0% |