LUMS Research On Boosting Bandwidth Featured In MIT Technology Magazine
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The September edition of the MIT Technology Review has featured the work of Umar Saif, a professor at LUMS, on improving Internet connectivity in the developing-world. The Project, dubbed DonateBandwidth, is a follow-up project of Poor Man’s Broadband work which I wrote about previously. Our congratulations to Dr. Saif and the team.
Umar shared his thoguhts in an e-mail:
With DonateBandwidth, users in the developing-world can help each other by donating their unused bandwidth to those who need it. This project received funding from the US State Department/NAS and HEC and will be further developed in collaboration with UC Berkeley.
It is rare that research in Pakistan catches the attention of a publication like the Technology Review; I am told this is the first time MIT Technology Review has featured a research project in LUMS.
Here is an excerpt of the article “Spare Some Bandwidth?”
nternet access is growing steadily in developing nations, but limited infrastructure means that at times connections can still be painfully slow. A major bottleneck for these countries is the need to force a lot of traffic through international links, which typically have relatively low bandwidth.
Now computer scientists in Pakistan are building a system to boost download speeds in the developing world by letting people effectively share their bandwidth. Software chops up popular pages and media files, allowing users to grab them from each other, building a grassroots Internet cache.
In developed countries, Internet service providers (ISPs) create Web caches–machines that copy and store content locally–to boost their customers’ browsing speeds. When a user wants to view a popular website, the information can be pulled from the cache instead of from the computer hosting the website, which may be on the other side of the planet and busy with requests. Similar services are offered by content distribution companies such as Akamai, based in Cambridge, MA. High-traffic sites pay Akamai to host copies of their content in multiple locations, and users are automatically served up a copy of the site from the cache closest to them.
In countries like Pakistan, Internet connections are generally slow and expensive, and few ISPs offer effective caching services, limiting access to information–one reason why the United Nations has made improving Internet connectivity worldwide one of its Millennium Development Goals. None of Pakistan’s small ISPs cache much data, and traffic is often routed through key Internet infrastructure in other nations.
“In Pakistan, almost all the traffic leaves the country,” says Umar Saif, a computer scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). That’s the case even when a Pakistani user is browsing websites hosted in his or her own country. “The packets can get routed all the way through New York and then back to Pakistan,” Saif says.
So Saif’s team at LUMS is developing DonateBandwidth, a system inspired by the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol that is popular for trading large music, film, and program files. With BitTorrent, people’s computers swap small pieces of a file during download, reducing the strain placed on the original source.
8:30 am
I think our government can afford bandwidth and hand out to research and development institutes.
Some universities have good connections but they don’t pass it to the students. I know of a large university who even doesn’t provide email address to it’s students while they charge high fees.
How can we take benefits from video lectures which universities like MIT and Yale provide via LectureFox and OCW.
8:33 am
Sorry about cynicisms. Congratulation to LUMS team and the professor.
We need more researchers in every field with private/public backing.
12:24 pm
Way to go Dr. Umar Saif. Good to know that there are people in Pakistan that can show the other part of research picture rather than terrorists.
Good luck to you and your team. A very nice idea of the project indeed. If i get the bandwidth of my neighbor that is not being used, I will be happy to accept.
Keep us updated.
1:04 pm
Ok congrats Dr Sahib, really happy for the thing. Wish you all the success.
Not trying to look the next retard but man – I had this idea in my brain for last 2 years now
Why didn’t I get on with it before!
2:30 pm
good to see G&W back with some post..
6:56 am
@Ujmi … ideas are cheap, beauty is in execution
9:15 pm
Spam?
4:48 pm
G&W is dead. R.I.P!
8:16 pm
Removed spam. Sorry heartbroken, G&W remains very much alive
10:13 am
Mocha. Yeah got to to agree with you there
Btw on a similar connected note, I guess looking at your some idea being already implemented and perhaps even done better – just makes one realize that we are not that much unique as we had assumed previously!
9:47 pm
Dr. Saif! Congratulations. Very encouraging to see your reaserch found mention in such a prestigious publication.
5:40 pm
LUMS is our hope that one day all the Pakistani institutions will be like them.
All the best to the LUMS team.
8:36 am
With due respect i would like to ask Dr sahab to show us a working system. I have read the paper (poor mans broadband) and i am 110% sure it is not implementable. Lying in science is a cardinal sin. i hope dr sahab knows that.
3:14 am
I hope we will hear more about such interesting projects in near future.
Well done LUMS.