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As the map below shows, Pakistan’s backbone is laid out from North to South and West to East. Peshawar region connects directly to Islamabad; Islamabad connects directly only to Lahore apart from Peshawar; Lahore accesses Karachi via Faisalabad and Quetta can only access rest of the country via Karachi.
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Map of the PERN backbone. Source: the Higher Education Commission, Pakistan. | Map of PERN2. Source: http://pern.edu.pk/images/home/download/hld.png | Map of PERN2 for the Islamabad region: Source: http://pern.edu.pk/images/lapopsislamabad.jpg | Map of Islamabad area with rough guesses at locations of the PoPs. F=FJWU (chaklala 3), B= NUST, C=AIOU, D=NDC, E=QAU. The distances are: F-B=20km, NUST-AIOU=9.3km, AIOU-QAU=17km, QAU-FJWU=30km. It is assumed the fibres roughly follow the roads. |
The difficulty of the installations has varied from site to site. The technical installation of the software etc. has been simple and not resulted in delays. The delays between deciding to install a monitoring host and gathering measurements from the host have mostly been due to: machine availability; getting administrative approval within university;getting access to the concerned local people, and delays in making the DNS record entry. Note we still do not have a DNS entry for the Lahore School of Economics, and had to enhance our software tools to accommodate this. Problems once it starts taking data are poor power availability, lack of backup power and access to the site when there are problems that needs physical access. The table below shows the history of the installation and remarks concerning the difficulty of installation and the reliability of the host:
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