Meeting with Pakistan HEC Chairman annd Executive Director Feb 2006

This an example of how the PingER project has helped a country (Pakistan) in improving its Education and Research Network.

Meeting with Pakistan HEC Chairman and CTO

On February during my 2006 trip to Pakistan Les Cottrell had a face-to-face meeting with Atta-ur-Rahman Federal Minister/Chairman, Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan and advisor to the Prime Minister of Pakistan on Science and Technology. Together with Atta was Sohail Naqvi Executive Director, (Ex-Officio Federal Secretary), HEC.

Over tea and biscuits using his laptop Les presented to Atta and Sohail the results from PingER measurements of networking in Pakistan. The main conclusion I presented was that though the Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN) (a project of the HEC) was well provisioned with 155 Mbits/sec links between the major cities, the university connections to PERN (the last mile) varied in capacity but were all under 2Mbits/s. Consequently these links were badly congested resulting in large jitter and packet loss that was observed by PingER. Some of these results were published and presented at a conference in India that Les attended on the way to Pakistan.

During this Pakistani visit, Les also met with the chairman of PERN as well as Salman Ansari Advisor to the Minister for IT & Telecommunications, Government of Pakistan and presented the same information to them.

As a result of these discussions the next generation network PERN-2 was designed and installed with 1 Gbit/sec links from backbone to the universities.  This is now (2011) in place. In addition a replica PingER project was installed with the express purpose of monitoring PERN-2. The main problem that we have now identified in PERN-2 using PingER, is that the power for many universities is unstable, resulting in frequent outages. As a result generators and battery back up systems are being installed at many universities for the network and critical computer services.