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Min RTT and Packet Loss of South Asian Countries
Pakistan
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. The network design consists of three nodal points at Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi interconnected by 50Mbps. Educational institutions are connected by a minimum of 2Mbits/s. All land based Internet connectivity is via the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) in 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.
Pakistan's sole under sea optical fibre link in 2005, 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 SEMEWE4 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
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 Roadsatellite 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.HEC is planning for the PERN-2 project. Tender for the deployment has been won by Almoayed Group in January 2007 for the deployment of 10Gbps Metro Ring for interconnecting universities. Initially universities will be connected with 1Gbps ethernet and will be replaced as soon the as the CPE (Customer Presence Equipment) routers with 10Gbps will be available to HEC.Mobilink has almost completed its backbone and has a submarine fibre link to its sister company TWA which will be the next national media provider after PTCL. This will be the a 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 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 more options for Pakistani network access. In what is believed to be the largest WiMAX network of its kind, Motorola has been selected as primary supplier to Pakistan's Wateen Telecom, part of Warid Telecom International, to plan, design and deploy a nationwide WiMAX network. It will be launched in March 2007
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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As for fiber, Bhutan Telecom is also in the same state as Nepal Telecom - they can only connect to BSNL on the indian side and cannot utilize the fiber that was laid by the Indian electric utility deep inside Bhtuan.
India
In the Fall of 2006 there were demonstrations of advanced networking at 622Mbps at CHEP06 in Mumbai, organized by the C-DAC, TIFR, and on the US side by IEEAF, ICFA/SCIC members, UWash/PNWGP, the WIDE Project at Keio University in Japan and others. This was followed by a workshop organized by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), ERNET, C-DAC, TIFR, and the National Knowledge Commission. Following this and advice provided by ICFA/SCIC members, Internet2, the IEEAF, 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.asp 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. Below are shown the current deployment of the Garuda and ERNET networks in India.
Maldives
We found two hosts in Maldives, (the traceroute results showed that the second last hop was through Itlay). The site has been added to the PingER Guthrie database. Later on we came to know by Guarab that at the start of 2007 the Maldives were connected through the SMW4 fibre as a result of collaboration between Dhiraagu and Telecom Italia Sparkle. There is an interesting report on Maldives Internet Connectivity at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/cs/maldives/material/CS_MDV_part3.pdf
Here is a press release from Telecom Italia Sparkle http://www.telecomitaliasparkle.com/press_info/press_info_index/event17.htm
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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.
India
In the Fall of 2006 there were demonstrations of advanced networking at 622Mbps at CHEP06 in Mumbai, organized by the C-DAC, TIFR, and on the US side by IEEAF, ICFA/SCIC members, UWash/PNWGP, the WIDE Project at Keio University in Japan and others. This was followed by a workshop organized by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), ERNET, C-DAC, TIFR, and the National Knowledge Commission. Following this and advice provided by ICFA/SCIC members, Internet2, the IEEAF, the Knowledge Commission of India issued a recommendation to create a Knowledge Network.
Pakistan
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. The network design consists of three nodal points at Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi interconnected by 50Mbps. Educational institutions are connected by a minimum of 2Mbits/s. All land based Internet connectivity is via the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) in 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.
Pakistan's sole under sea optical fibre link in 2005, 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 SEMEWE4 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
HEC is planning for the PERN-2 project. Tender for the deployment has been won by Almoayed Group in January 2007 for the deployment of 10Gbps Metro Ring for interconnecting universities. Initially universities will be connected with 1Gbps ethernet and will be replaced as soon the as the CPE (Customer Presence Equipment) routers with 10Gbps will be available to HEC.Mobilink has almost completed its backbone and has a submarine fibre link to its sister company TWA which will be the next national media provider after PTCL. This will be the a 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 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 more options for Pakistani network access. In what is believed to be the largest WiMAX network of its kind, Motorola has been selected as primary supplier to Pakistan's Wateen Telecom, part of Warid Telecom International, to plan, design and deploy a nationwide WiMAX network. It will be launched in March 2007India 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.asp 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. Below are shown the current deployment of the Garuda and ERNET networks in India.
Sri Lanka
The Lanka Education And Research Network (LEARN) is the NREN (National Research and Education Network) of Sri Lanka, which interconnects Educational and Research institutions across the country. LEARN interconnects 24 sites with link speeds ranging from 128kbps to multiple 2Mbps links. The establishment of 2Mbps links to 8 sites with the financial support of Sida/SAREC has been a major milestone in this path. LEARN is currently in the process of upgrading the link bandwidths to 16 of its sites to 10Mbps over optical fiber. Several links have already been upgraded, and the remaining links will be upgraded by June 2007. This upgrade was made possible with the World Bank funded IRQUE Project providing funds for 10 of the 16 links.
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