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South Asia Case Study

PingER Coverage South Asian Countries


 

 South Asia as compared to the rest of the world regions


 

 

Min RTT and Packet Loss of South Asian Countries

Pakistan

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 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.  All land based Internet connectivity is via the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) in Karachi where the fibres come ashore. PIE in turn is managed by Pakistan Telecommunication Compant Limited (PTCL). PTCL has excess capacity on its long haul international fibers.

Pakistan's sole under sea optical fiber link in 2005, called Southeast Asia, Middle East and Western Europe-3 (SEAMEWE-3), stopped working for about 12 days 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   

Mobilink has almost completed its backbone and has a submarine fiber link to its sister company TWA which will be the next national media provider after PTCL. This will be the 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.

Bangladesh

SEMEW4 has greatly affected 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.

There is a 2004 presentation at http://www.apng.org/xoops/modules/camp/download/72-3-1.ppt that explains the situation in Bangladesh.
Contact for main Universities in Bangladesh   http://www.nsrc.org/db/lookup/report.php?id=1098894702546:489036339&fromISO=BD
Acedemic Networking 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 Access Points for the first incarnation of the RUB network. 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/
 
Steve Huter 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 at the start of 2007 the Maldives were connected through the SMW4 fibre as a result of collaboration between Dhiraagu and Telecom Italia Sparkle. There is an interesting report on Maldives Internet Connectivity at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/cs/maldives/material/CS_MDV_part3.pdf
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 via optical fibre. But still most of the sites are 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. Our HostSearcher tool found 25 sites in Nepal with min RTT > 500 ms, so these results indicate that still most of the country is dependent on satellite link.

Afghanistan 

PingER has three three sites in Afghanistan that are monititored and they were quite hard to get. For example the Kabul University host is a firewall that does not have stable power and so is usually turned off at night. Also these sites have minimum RTTs greater than 700 ms which indicates that they are all on satellite. The Kabul host is connected via the Silk Road satellite that passes through DESY, Germany. The other two are connected via Telia a European ISP. On March 10, 2003, Afghanistan went live on the Web which was previous banned under the Taliban rule. The Internet infrastructure in Afghanistan is immature and the pricing for internet is quite high.

India 

In the Fall of 2006 there were demonstrations of advanced networking at 622Mbps organized by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), C-DAC, ERNET, TIFR and the National Knowledge Commission, at CHEP06 in Mumbai, followed by a workshop. Following this and advice provided by ICFA/SCIC members, Internet2, the IEEAF and others, the Knowledge Commission of India issued a recommendation to create a Knowledge Network.

India has rapidly moved forward towards advanced network infrastructure (i.e. a backbone like Abilene and possibly CENIC-like organization which our Indian colleagues refer to as SPV: special purpose vehicle). The Indian Prime Minister has accepted the National Knowledge Commission recommendations and efforts are on to create a CENIC like organization to provide the shared gigabit optical fiber backbone to all RENs including ERNET, Garuda, science and technology research network and medical research and education network among others. The recommendation letter from the Knowledge Commission may be found at http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/recommendations/networks.asp and the report on the National Knowledge Network by Dr. D.P.S. Seth at http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/downloads/documents/er_nknet.pdf. Below are shown the current deployment of the Garuda and ERNET networks in India.

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