The Twenty Ninth South Asia Network Operators Group (SANOG) conference was held at HEC Headquarters in Islamabad, Pakistan from 23-30 January 2017.PTA (Pakistan Telecommunication Authority) and HEC (Higher Education Commission) , along with PERN (Pakistan Education & Research Network), were the joint hosts for SANOG 29 in Islamabad.
Mr Muhammad Ahsan represented SST from UMT in this conference while many other IT/Network experts from corporate sector of Pakistan as well as from whole Asia Pacific joined the conference.
Full day workshops were conducted on three different tracks by world renowned experts.
Assistant Professor Muhammad Ahsan participated in the first track of workshop ( IPv4 / IPv6 )
IPv4/IPv6 Routing:
Fakrul Alam (APNIC) & Aftab Siddiqui (ISOC)
DNS/DNSSEC:
Champika Wijayatunga (ICANN), Dr. Rao Naveed Bin Rais (AUST), Naveed Tahir (HEC), Manahil Ahmed Khan
Campus Network Design & Security:
Dr. Philip Smith (NSRC), Nimal Ratnayake (NSRC), Matsuzaki Yoshinobu (IIJ)
The Conference along with Workshops and tutorials were indeed very advance and gave practical insight of how different routing policies are working on the upstream as well as downstream. Later on Pakistan Telecommunication Authority inaugurated Pakistan Internet Exchange in Islamabad.
PTA said that at least two more internet exchanges (for Karachi and Lahore) are in pipeline and will be deployed with time. After this all local internet traffic will be routed through local internet exchange. Previously, local internet traffic was routed through foreign internet exchanges — placed outside Pakistan — and hence caused increased latency and tons of cost for transporting bandwidth even when both user and server were located with-in Pakistan.By keeping local traffic local and avoiding international links, local operators and users can reap substantial cost savings, provide substantial local bandwidth and significantly improve local Internet performance.
An inauguration ceremony for IXP was held in Islamabad where Anusha Rehman, Minister for IT and Telecom, was the chief guest. Dr. Ismail Shah, Chairman PTA was host of the event while Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed, Chairman HEC and Country Lead for Huawei Pakistan were also present on stage.
Mr. Muhammad Ahsan recieving certificate for workshop
Mr. Muhammad Ahsan with Dr. Philips