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A presentation about the internet connectivity in Nepal can be found here. Recently Nepal Telecom struck a deal with Indian BSNL so now the land locked Nepal will have access via optical fibre. Previously they were largly dependent But still most of the sites are on VSAT. Here is the complete story Out of the nodes that PingER monitors in Nepal one is connected through Indian BSNL (koshi.ioe.edu.np) with a average RTT of 330 ms. The other one is connected directly to New York through a Satellite link (most.gov.np) with an average RTT of 550 ms. Our HostSearcher tool found 25 sites in Nepal with min RTT > 500 ms, so these results indicate that still most of the country is dependent on satellite link.
Afghanistan
PingER has three three sites in Afghanistan that are monititored and they were quite hard to get. For example the Kabul University host is a firewall that does not have stable power and so is usually turned off at night. Also these sites have minimum RTTs greater than 700 ms which indicates that they are all on satellite. The Kabul host is connected via the Silk Road satellite that passes through DESY, Germany. The other two are connected via Telia a European ISP. 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.
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