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The Pakistan's sole under sea optical fiber link, called Southeast Asia, Middle East and Western Europe-3 (SEAMEWE-3), stopped working due to a fault from
27th June to the 8th of July 2005. This disruption halted the global connectivity of almost 10 million internet users in the country. The details can be found here.
Recently Pakistan has connected to SEMEW4 which provides Pakistan with a redundant link in case the outage occurs again. Here is the complete story
http://www.pkblogs.com/pakistan/2006/01/smw4-mitigates-total-blackouts.html Here is a case study of Internet connectivity of NUST Institute of Information Technology (NIIT) that was done in 2004 Internet performance for NIIT, Pakistan Jan - Feb 2004 PERN - Pakistan Education and Research Network is funded by the Pakistan Higher Education Committee (HEC) and is a nationwide educational intranet connecting premiere educational and research institutions of the country.
Bangladesh
SEMEW4 SEMEW4 has greatly effected affected the internet connectivity of Bangladesh , before Before this Bangladesh relied on VSAT for Internet connectivity.
Most of the sites now have moved to fiber but some of them are still on satellite. We used our HostSearcher tool which searches for sites on Google.
Out of 20 sites that we located in Bangladesh 3 had min RTT > 500 ms indicating that they are on satellite. Bangladesh has now got 2 STM-1 links with
MCI and Singtel.
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We have three sites in Afghanistan and they were quite hard to get. Also these sites have min RTT greater than 700 ms which indicates that they are on satellite. On March 10, 2003, Afghanistan went live on the Web which was previous banned under the Taliban rule. The Internet infrastructure in Afghanistan is immature and the pricing for internet is quite high.
India
In the Fall of 2006 there were demonstrations of advanced networking at 622Mbps at CHEP06 in Mumbai, followed by a workshop immediately following CHEP06. Following this and advice provided by ICFA/SCIC members, Internet2, the IEEAF and others, the Knowledge Commission of India issued a recommendation to create a Knowledge Network.
India has rapidly moved forward towards advanced network infrastructure (i.e. a backbone like Abilene and possibly CENIC-like organization which our Indian colleagues refer to as SPV: special purpose vehicle). The Indian Prime Minister has accepted the National Knowledge Commission recommendations and efforts are on to create a CENIC like organization to provide the shared gigabit optical fiber backbone to all RENs including ERNET, Garuda, science and technology research network and medical research and education network among others. The recommendation letter from the Knowledge Commission may be found at http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/recommendations/networks.aspAnd and the report on the National Knowledge Network by Dr. D.P.S. Seth at http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/downloads/documents/er_nknet.pdf
UseFul Links
- MOSAIC The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project They have done case studies on Internet for almost 30 countries including India and Pakistan. Although some of them are not recent, but some of the information here may be still relavent. http://mosaic.unomaha.edu/gdi.html
- http://www.telegeography.com/
- http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
- The American Physical Society (APS) Forum on International Physics (FIP) has organized two sessions on the Bridging the Digital Divide at the April 14-17 2007 meeting in Jacksonville, Florida.