South Asia Case Study
Min RTT and Packet Loss of South Asian Countries
Pakistan
The Pakistan's sole under sea optical fiber link, called Southeast Asia, Middle East and Western Europe-3 (SEAMEWE-3), stopped working 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 SEMEW4 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 PERN - Pakistan Education and Research Network is a nationwide educational intranet connecting premiere educational and research institutions of the country.
Bangladesh
SEMEW4 has greatly effected 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 . Here is a presentation that explains http://www.apng.org/xoops/modules/camp/download/72-3-1.ppt
Contact for main Universities in Bangladesh http://www.nsrc.org/db/lookup/report.php?id=1098894702546:489036339&fromISO=BD
Acedemic Netwoking in Bangladesh http://www.nsrc.org/db/lookup/report.php?id=42&fromISO=BD
South Asian Network Operators Group V http://www.sanog.org/sanog5/index.html
Bhutan
In March 2005, NSRC donated a couple of routers, a switch, and some wireless APS for the first incarnation of the RUB network. And Steve Huter
has been working some with the main engineer doing the network design, deploy, etc. for the university network. In close collaboration with his good friend,
Gaurab Upadhaya, who is part of this planning group, NSRC collaborated with SANOG (www.sanog.org) to organize and teach in a couple of the first tech
workshops held in Bhutan for local networkers, including some participation from the education sector.
http://ws.edu.isoc.org/workshops/2005/pre-SANOG-VI/
http://ws.edu.isoc.org/workshops/2005/SANOG-VI/
He also paid a visited to Bhutan in November and the situation there is relatively simple. There had been a number of colleges spread throughout the country and a few years ago they were assimilated into the new Royal University of Bhutan (RUB). The university is building a RUBWAN, a fiber network linking all the constituent colleges. There is also a fiber link to India from Bhutan, so they are relatively quite advanced. The hub of the network will be in a new Vice Chancellor's building in Thimphu, the capital, which is the planning stage.
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 Maldives just got connected through SMW4 as a result of collaboration between Dhiraagu and Telecom
Italia Sparkle. This is an interesting report on Maldives Internet Connectivity www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/cs/maldives/material/CS_MDV_part3.pdf
Maldives got fiber connectivity early this year. Here is a press release from Telecom Italia Sparkle http://www.telecomitaliasparkle.com/press_info/press_info_index/event17.htm
Nepal
A presentation about the internet connectivity in Nepal can be found here. Recently Nepal Telecom struck a deal with Indian BSNL so now the land locked Nepal will have access optic fibre, which previously was largly dependent on VSAT. Here is the complete story 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.
Afghanistan
We got three sites in Afghanistan and they were quite hard to get. Also of the three sites have min RTT greater than 700 ms which indicates that they are on satellite.
UseFul Links
- MOSAIC The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project They have done case studies on Internet for almost 30 countries including India and Pakistan. Although some of them are not recent, but some of the information here may be still relavent. http://mosaic.unomaha.edu/gdi.html
- http://www.telegeography.com/
- http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm