KENET & REGIONAL COLLABORATION NETWORKS:

Transcription

1 KENET & REGIONAL COLLABORATION NETWORKS: A critique of KENET's readiness by Kennedy Aseda Senior Network Engineer KENET

2 Introduction The growth of a society is highly pegged on the growth and quality of education provided to its members and this is evident in the number of innovations that have spurred from universities and research institutes the world over. With the advancement in technology and the penetration of the Internet, education currently leverages a lot on Internet to provide affordable means of doing research and solving problems in the society. In Kenya, Internet penetration stood at 34.2% in the year 2012 up from 22.7% in 2011 with a majority of users accessing through portable devices like laptops and smart phones. This has led to an increase in on-campus and off-campus access to educational resources in Kenya. A Kenyan Perspective Kenya Education Network ( is the Kenyan National Research & Education Network (NREN) and currently connects approximately 125 campuses of Universities, University Colleges and Research Institutions consuming about 2.4Gbps of Internet bandwidth and serving more than 280,000 students. These sites are connected using a mix of high speed last mile technologies including fiber and radio technologies. In 2013, Kenya Education Network (KENET) plans to upgrade at least 20 last mile connections to 1Gbps and extend its 10Gbps backbone network to cover more Points of Presence (PoPs). These initiatives allowed researchers and students easy and fast access to on-line journals, electronic publications and video tutorials that helped with self-paced learning. Finally, newer fronts are being considered including use of video and web-conferencing as a tool of leveraging their existing distance learning programmes. KENET has also in the last six (6) months installed campus wireless LANs in at least ten (10) University Campuses and this has increased Internet coverage for students in participating Universities and campuses. This has increased the Internet penetration in the campuses and the number of network devices accessing Internet connectivity for both the students and staff. An African Perspective With support of their European partners; DANTE ( partnered with UbuntuNet Alliance member NRENs to establish the AfricaConnect project ( The project is aimed at interconnecting UbuntuNet Alliance member NRENs to the European research networks as well as interconnecting NRENs in Eastern and Southern Africa. This will

3 foster collaboration within Eastern and Southern African countries and hopefully expand to cover West African countries. Collaboration among all African countries is critical in creating lasting solutions to problems that affect the continent especially with health, education and agriculture. KENET is participating in the AfricaConnect project and being in operation for a number of years, KENET has been eagerly awaiting for the actual implementation of AfricaConnect project. The project envisages to have a node in Nairobi that will be a hub to interconnect the Eastern Africa NRENs as well as offer International bandwidth to participating NRENs. Collaboration Benefits There are numerous benefits for KENET in the AfricaConnect project. First, KENET will enjoy direct connectivity to participating NRENs and enjoy reduced latency when collaborating with other universities in participating countries. This will result in more collaboration between KENET and other participating countries with initiatives like the ei4africa and GRID initiatives. KENET also hosts within its network a number of content sources that include an Internet Measurements Lab site and software mirrors that will be beneficial to participating countries. With the possibility of access to International bandwidth from the AfricaConnect project and the challenges previously encountered with fiber cuts on wet cable segments KENET will benefit a lot by having a ready source of International bandwidth without the need of expensive hardware upgrades and new installations. This is because through having a presence at the Nairobi node of the AfricaConnect project, KENET has the ability to absorb up to 10Gbps capacity back into KENET's core network without any upgrade requirements. The Expertise A pool of 20 engineers currently works at KENET with expertise in network engineering, network administration and systems administration. The engineers are part of the network operations (NOC) team and are well versed with multi-vendor systems including Cisco, HP, and Juniper network hardware with the vast majority having experience with Cisco. KENET is encouraging some of its engineers to upgrade their skills on other vendor environments. To assist the NOC team with their work, KENET has implemented network management

4 systems, a help desk system and SMS alert systems that are tightly integrated. These tools not only give monthly availability reports that indicate reasons for outage, associated ticket numbers for each of KENET's connected sites but also escalate outstanding problems that have not been resolved. With these systems, KENET can help the AfricaConnect project with network monitoring facilities. My role at KENET is to coordinate the network operations team and to optimize the network at KENET. During the implementation of the AfricaConnect project, I will be involved with the integration of KENET's network into AfricaConnect and also assist other NRENs with implementation challenges if requested. KENET also notes with appreciation the existing twinning arrangement between KENET and DFN, the German NREN that is part of the AfricaConnect through DANTE/GEANT as well as previous and on-going capacity development workshops organized by AfricaConnect to improve the technical capacity of engineers in UbuntuNet Alliance member NRENs. Beyond Currently, KENET is facing a couple of challenges including undersea fiber faults, increased demand for international bandwidth, lack of advanced skills in specific vendor environments, lack of adequate network engineering skills in campuses, and availability of local content to make better use of the broadband network. Some of these challenges can be solved in the short term with projects such as AfricaConnect, ei4africa and eduroam among others. It is however important to start considering cost-effective ways of creating and serving local content from the research community. KENET is therefore ready to integrate and make use of connectivity from the AfricaConnect project as well as assist in the integration and support of other NRENs that will have challenges that may occur. KENET however requires capacity building on the hardware that will be installed at the AfricaConnect hub in Nairobi so as to effectively support the project after implementation.

5 About Kennedy Aseda Kennedy Aseda is a Senior Network Engineer at KENET and has been working at KENET since He holds a Bsc. in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the University Of Nairobi and is a member of Kenya's National IPv6 Task Force as well as National CIRT/CC. He primarily works on KENET's core network and focuses on routing, switching and configuration backup of network devices. He also has a passion in process automation of network tasks and notification. KENET ( is the Research and Education Network in Kenya.