2001
Towards the end of 2001 the number of sites monitored started dropping as sites blocked pings due to security concerns. The rate of blocking was such that, for example, out of 214 hosts that were pingable in July 2003, 33 (~15%) were no longer pingable in December 2003 even though they were still up and running (as measured by responding to TCP probes).
2002
The increases in monitored sites towards the end of 2002 and early 2003 was due to help from the Abdus Salam Institute of Theoretical Physics (ICTP). The ICTP held a Round Table meeting on Developing Country Access to On-Line Scientific Publishing: Sustainable Alternatives in Trieste in November 2002 that included a Proposal for Real time monitoring in Africa. Following the meeting a formal declaration was made on Recommendations of the Round Table held in Trieste to help bridge the digital divide. The PingER project started collaborating closely with the ICTP to develop a monitoring project aimed at better understanding and quantifying the Digital Divide. On December 4th, 2002 the ICTP electronic Journal Distribution Service (eJDS) sent an email entitled Internet Monitoring of Universities and Research Centers in Developing Countries to their collaborators informing them of the launch of the monitoring project and requesting participation. By January 14th 2003, with the help of ICTP, we added about 23 hosts in about 17 countries including: Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Columbia, Ghana, Guatemala, India (Hyderabad and Kerala), Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Korea, Mexico, Moldova, Nigeria, Pakistan, Slovakia and the Ukraine. The increase towards the end of 2003 was spurred by preparations for the second Open Round Table on Developing Countries Access to Scientific Knowledge: Quantifying the Digital Divide 23-24 November Trieste, Italy and the WSIS conference and associated activities in Geneva December 2003.
The increases in 2004 were due to adding new sites especially in Africa, S. America, Russia and several outlying islands.
In 2005, the Pakistan Ministry Of Science and Technology (MOST) and the US State Department funded SLAC and the National University of Sciences and Technology’s (NUST), School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (SEECS, formerly known as NUST Institute of Information Technology (NIIT)) to collaborate on a project to improve and extend PingER. As part of this project and the increased interest from Internet2 in the “Hard to Reach Network Places” Special Interest Group, many new sites in the South Asia and Africa were added to increase the coverage in these regions and also to replace sites that were blocking pings. For instance we were unable to find pingable sites in Angola prior to December 2005. Also as part of this project we started to integrate PingER with the NLANR/AMP project and as a result a number of the AMP nodes were added as PingER remote hosts in the developing regions. With help of Duncan Martin and the South Africa Tertiary Education Network (TENET) (http://www.tenet.ac.za
), we successfully set up a monitoring node in South Africa, which became a great help in viewing the Digital Divide from within the Divide. With the help of SEECS, NUST (www.seecs.nust.edu.pk), a monitoring node was set up at NUST and in Nov. 2005, another node was added at NTC (National Telecommunication Corporation www.ntc.net.pk), which is the service provider for the PERN (Pakistan Educational and Research Network www.pern.edu.pk).
Again in 2006 in preparation for a conference on Sharing Knowledge across the Mediterranean at ICTP Trieste Nov 6-8, 2006, we added many new sites especially in Africa. Additionally, new monitoring nodes were setup in Pakistan (National Center for Physics (NCP)), Australia (University of New South Wales) and South Korea (Kyung Hee University).
In 2007, an effort was made to find new monitored nodes in countries not previously being observed. This was:
- To improve comparisons with human and economic development indices from the ITU, the UNDP, the World Bank, the CIA and also measures of International bandwidth capacity/country.
- To better enable validation of PingER derived throughputs versus throughput measures from Ookla Speedtest.net and ZDnet speedtest.
- To prepare for case studies on South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa .
- To prepare for invited talks given at the American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Jacksonville Florida , the IHY in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia , and the Sharing Knowledge Foundation in Montpellier, France . In addition a talk was given at the Internet2 Spring Members meeting.
- To prepare for a visit to NUST in Pakistan and talks to be given there.
- Collaboration with James Whitlock of the Bethlehem Alliance resulted in two monitoring hosts in Palestine (Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip).
As a result, in 2007, the total number of hosts monitored from SLAC went up from 334 to 442, the main increases being in Africa which went from 58 to 95 hosts, South Asia from 20 to 37 hosts, Middle East 15 to 26 hosts, and South East Asia from 12 to 22 hosts. We added over a hundred new hosts from Ookla servers which cover over 50 countries.
In 2008 due to US Science budget cuts in particular in HEP, there were layoffs at SLAC and a redirection of goals that led to a much reduced support for PingER. This is discussed in the section “Outlook: cloudy” in http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000639. Despite this, with some remaining funding from past projects, and with three graduate students from SEECS Pakistan and donating time, the project has successfully continued running.
In 2009 the support for PingER continued at a similar level to that in 2008. We were fortunate to have continued support from Pakistan, including 2-3 graduate students and a lecturer, at SLAC for a year. The increase in number of hosts in Africa was enabled by invited talks in Ethiopia and Zambia, a paper at a conference in Namibia, a series of four lectures to African computing and networking people at a meeting at the ICTP in Trieste, and a talk on African Internet performance at the European Geophysical Union in Vienna.
In 2010 support for PingER continued especially in Pakistan, where about 17 new nodes were added. NUST SEECS also sent 2 students for one year each for work related to the IEPM project, there was an increase in the number of hosts in Africa, Latin America, East Asia and South East Asia as well.
In 2011, NUST SEECS sent two more students for one year each for research related to the IEPM project. In 2011, there was a concentration on carefully locating the hosts to aid in geo-location and plotting on the PingER map. We also removed hosts not responsive for > 3 months and replaced those in developing countries with responsive hosts and where possible ensured that there were >=2 hosts in developing countries.
In 2012, we added about 30 hosts in Malaysia and S. E Asia as part of the MoU with the University of Malaysia in Sarawak (UNIMAS).