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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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In 2008 due to US Science budget cuts in particular in HEP, there were layoffs at SLAC and a redirection of goals that led to a much reduced support for PingER. This is discussed in the section “Outlook: cloudy” in http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000639. Despite this, with some remaining funding from past projects, and with three graduate students from SEECS Pakistan and donating time, the project has successfully continued running.
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