Meeting with Pakistan HEC Chairman and CTO
On February during my 2006 trip to Pakistan I had a long face-to-face meeting with Atta-ur-Rahman Federal Minister/Chairman, Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan and advisor to the Prime Minister of Pakistan on Science and Technology. Together with Atta was Sohail Naqv Executive Director, (Ex-Officio Federal Secretary), HEC.
From the left: Sohail Naqvi, Les Cottrell, Atta-ur-Rahman and the vice-Rector of NUST |
|---|
|
Over tea and biscuits using my laptop I presented to them the results from PingER measurements of networking in Pakistan. The main conclusion I presented was that though the Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN) was well provisioned with 155 Mbits/sec links between the major cities, the university connections to PERN (the last mile) varied in capacity but were all under 2Mbits/s. Consequently these links were badly congested resulting in large jitter and packet loss that was observed by PingER. Some of these results were published and presented at a conference in India taht I attended on the way to Pakistan
As a result of these discussions the next generation network PERN-II was designed and installed with 1 Gbit/sec links from backbone to the universities. This is now (2011) in place. The main problem we have now identified using PingER is that the power for many universities is unstable, resulting in frequent outages. As a result generators and battery back up systems are being installed at many universities for the network and critical computer services.