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Pakistan's sole under sea optical fiber link, called Southeast Asia, Middle East and Western Europe-3 (SEAMEWE-3), stopped working for about 12 days 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. The network provider for PERN is NTC. All land based Internet connectivity is via the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) in Karaci Karachi where the fibres come ashore. PIE in turn is managed by Pakistan Telecommunication Compant Limited (PTCL). PTCL has excess capacity on its long haul international fibers.
Mobilink has almost completed its backbone and has a submarine fiber link to its sister company TWA which will be the next national media provider after PTCL. This will be the third undersea fibre cable project for Pakistan (SEAMEW3 and 4 are the first two and are operated by PTCL). In February 2007 Telekom Malaysia announced that the company is set to complete its US$100 million countrywide fiber-optic-backbone project in Pakistan - the largest fiber-optic network in the country - by October 2007. The backbone will link more than 75 major towns and cities in Pakistan. The project is with Multinet, a Pakistan ISP that is now a subsidiary of Teelkom Telekom Malaysia. A fourth company, Wateen is laying out a fiber backbone at a cost of $100M. It appears that all of this investment will provide an alternative to PTCLmore options for Pakistani network access.
Bangladesh
SEMEW4 has greatly affected the internet connectivity of Bangladesh 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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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.
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