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The increases in monitored sites towards the end of 2002 and early 2003 was due to help from the Abdus Salam Institute of Theoretical Physics (ICTP). The ICTP held a Round Table meeting on Developing Country Access to On-Line Scientific Publishing: Sustainable Alternatives in Trieste in November 2002 that included a Proposal for Real time monitoring in Africa. Following the meeting a formal declaration was made on Recommendations of the Round Table held in Trieste to help bridge the digital divide. The PingER project started collaborating closely with the ICTP to develop a monitoring project aimed at better understanding and quantifying the Digital Divide. On December 4th, 2002 the ICTP electronic Journal Distribution Service (eJDS) sent an email entitled Internet Monitoring of Universities and Research Centers in Developing Countries to their collaborators informing them of the launch of the monitoring project and requesting participation. By January 14th 2003, with the help of ICTP, we added about 23 hosts in about 17 countries including: Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Columbia, Ghana, Guatemala, India (Hyderabad and Kerala), Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Korea, Mexico, Moldova, Nigeria, Pakistan, Slovakia and the Ukraine. The increase towards the end of 2003 was spurred by preparations for the second Open Round Table on Developing Countries Access to Scientific Knowledge: Quantifying the Digital Divide 23-24 November Trieste, Italy and the WSIS conference and associated activities in Geneva December 2003.
2004
The increases in remote nodes 2004 were due to adding new sites especially in Africa, S. America, Russia and several outlying islands.
2005
In 2005, the Pakistan Ministry Of Science and Technology (MOST) and the US State Department funded SLAC and the National University of Sciences and Technology’s (NUST), School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (SEECS, formerly known as NUST Institute of Information Technology (NIIT)) to collaborate on a project to improve and extend PingER. As part of this project and the increased interest from Internet2 in the “Hard to Reach Network Places” Special Interest Group, many new sites in the South Asia and Africa were added to increase the coverage in these regions and also to replace sites that were blocking pings. For instance we were unable to find pingable sites in Angola prior to December 2005. Also as part of this project we started to integrate PingER with the NLANR/AMP project and as a result a number of the AMP nodes were added as PingER remote hosts in the developing regions. With help of Duncan Martin and the South Africa Tertiary Education Network (TENET) (http://www.tenet.ac.za
), we successfully set up a monitoring node in South Africa, which became a great help in viewing the Digital Divide from within the Divide. With the help of SEECS, NUST, a monitoring node was set up at NUST and in Nov. 2005, another node was added at NTC (National Telecommunication Corporation}, which is the service provider for the PERN (Pakistan Educational and Research Network.
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The funding from the Pakistan Higher Education Commission there wasa (HEC) for the PingER project ended. As a result there were no students from Pakistan at SLAC from April though the end of the year. The program with Pakistan continued at a reduced level with fortnightly Skype meetings. The main focus was on GeoLocation (TULIP) and extending the PingER monitoring within Pakistan with bi-monthly reports from NUST to the HEC. There was a visit to SLAC in September, by the Director General of SEECS (Dr. Arshad Ali) and the Rector of NUST. As a result of this we hope for limited funding from NUST to support a NUST srudent student at SLAC for a year starting in 2013.
In 2012, we also completed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between SLAC and the University of Malaysia in Sarawak (UNIMAS). As a result of this program we added a monitoring host at UNIMAS and about 30 hosts in Malaysia and S. E Asia. In December, we also gave a workshop on PingER at UNIMAS, as well as a talk at the Malaysian National Regional and Education Network (MYREN) in Kuala Lumpur on the way to Sarawak.
More publicity for PingER was forthcoming following