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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 current (Jan 2007) 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. PERN is also trying to provide access platform for the interconnection of universities/educational institutions with the Virtual University
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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
Future Planning
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 in Islamabad for interconnecting universities18 university campuses. 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
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WiMAX network. It will be launched in March 2007
NIIT Case Study
In August 2006 NIIT announced it that has 'made an entrance into high-performance computing by setting up the first grid enabled super computing facility in Pakistani academia. As part of an ongoing collaborative research with CERN-Europe and SLAC-USA, the NIIT cluster will also act as a node for the computational and data Grid, spanning the globe to analyze data from particle physics experiments, solving highly complex matrices, simulate physical phenomena in electromagnetics, to model devices in quantum electronics and to analyze massive data sets in bioinformatics and seismology. NIIT's high performance center will be a cluster of four SUN Microsystems V890 64-bit compute servers (8 microprocessors in each server), 4 high-end 64-bit SUN UltraSPARC dual processor workstations, 21 mid-range Sun UltraSPARC 64-bit single processor workstations, 05 AMD 64-bit Opteron Workstations, 3 high-performance SunFire V240 dual processor file servers and 1.5 Terabyte storage, all connected over a gigabit speed Myrinet network. With total of more than 64 processors available for computation and more than 256 gigabyte of RAM, the cluster will constitute a hybrid shared-memory and distributed-memory parallel computer. The cluster will therefore enable researchers to model and simulate computationally expensive experiments not only locally but will also facilitate them to run their jobs on internationally available grid enabled clusters across the world.'
On 28th Feb,2007 NIIT was not accessible from SLAC probably due to some router mis-configuration at Nayatel. It became accessible from SLAC on 1st March, 2007 but the total number of hops has increased to 27 with 4 loop backs. Here is the traceroute from SLAC to NIIT
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traceroute to mbl-99-50-204.dsl.net.pk (203.99.50.204): 1-30 hops, 38 byte packets
1rtrg-nethub.slac.stanford.edu (134.79.19.1) 0.451 ms (ttl=255)
2rtr-core1-p2p-servcore1.slac.stanford.edu (134.79.255.25) 0.318 ms (ttl=254)
3rtr-dmz1-ger.slac.stanford.edu (134.79.135.15) 0.405 ms (ttl=252\!)
4192.68.191.146 (192.68.191.146) 0.440 ms (ttl=250\!)
5slacmr1-slacrt4.es.net (134.55.209.93) 0.409 ms (ttl=250\!)
6snv2mr1-slacmr1.es.net (134.55.217.2) 0.826 ms (ttl=249\!)
7snv1mr1-snv2mr1.es.net (134.55.217.5) 0.793 ms (ttl=248\!)
8snvcr1-snv1mr1.es.net (134.55.218.21) 0.925 ms (ttl=246\!)
9paix-pa-snv.es.net (134.55.208.205) 52.1 ms (ttl=245\!)
10g1-0-0.plapx-ar1.ix.singtel.com (198.32.176.50) 102 ms (ttl=244\!)
11203.208.168.133 (203.208.168.133) 94.4 ms (ttl=243\!)
12p1-0.sngtp-cr3.ix.singtel.com (203.208.182.129) 321 ms (ttl=243\!)
13203.208.182.157 (203.208.182.157) 306 ms (ttl=242\!)
14203.208.149.218 (203.208.149.218) 319 ms (ttl=241\!)
15203.208.149.105 (203.208.149.105) 385 ms (ttl=239\!)
16203.208.149.109 (203.208.149.109) 327 ms (ttl=238\!)
17203.208.147.238 (203.208.147.238) 287 ms (ttl=236\!)
18203.208.147.238 (203.208.147.238) 306 ms (ttl=236\!)
19pos1-0.rwp44gsrc2.pie.net.pk (202.125.159.21) 319 ms (ttl=236\!)
20ge-st.nayatel.pk (58.65.166.249) 328 ms (ttl=233\!)
2158-65-175-218.nayatel.pk (58.65.175.218) 313 ms (ttl=232\!)
2258-65-175-218.nayatel.pk (58.65.175.218) 317 ms (ttl=232\!)
23ge-0-1-bras1.dsl.net.pk (203.82.48.162) 334 ms (ttl=231\!)
24ge-st.nayatel.pk (58.65.166.249) 325 ms (ttl=233\!)
2558-65-175-222.nayatel.pk (58.65.175.222) 330 ms (ttl=232\!)
26ge-0-1-bras1.dsl.net.pk (203.82.48.162) 322 ms (ttl=231\!)
27mbl-82-56-95.dsl.net.pk (203.82.56.95) 371 ms (ttl=39\!)
28mbl-99-50-204.dsl.net.pk (203.99.50.204) 369 ms (ttl=38\!)
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Qaid-e-Azam University
.dsl.net.pk (203.99.50.204) 369 ms (ttl=38\!)
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Qaid-e-Azam University (QAU)
The National Centre for Physics (NC) located on the QAU campus is building a new cluster to be initially used mainly by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project at CERN. The current cluster, although small. includes all the princiapsl for a large cluster and will expand when NCP moves to its new quarters later this (2007), or early next year.
PingER PingER data shows that the link to Qaid-e-Azam university is heavily congested. The wave of congestion starts about 9:00 am in the morning and continues to about 6:00 pm in the evening. The graph shows the Avg RTT from NIIT to Qaid-e-Azam University from 19th Feb - 25th Feb, 2007. Sunday is less congested as compared to the rest of the weekdays which is understandable as it is holiday and less students use internet. One cannot explain why 22nd Feb was less congested as compared to other weekdays.
Qaid-e-Azam University is connected through PERN and its ISP is NTC. The traceroute results ( 28th Feb 11:00 am from NIIT) showed that the link from PIE (Pakistan Internet Exchange) to PERN was heavily congested. The traceroute shows that it took about 400 ms from PIE to PERN which should normally take <10 ms as the two routers are in the same city.
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More information can be found at http://nsrc.org/ASIA/LK/17-Oct-2006_Sri-Lanka-Internet-Status.pdf 
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Comparison of TCP Throughput with Digital Access Index
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