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Final step on the Virtual Silk Highway

About... The Virtual Silk Highway

With these short words from the Virtual Silk Highway team, sent by e-mail from Ashgabat, Turkmenistan on 22 August 2003, a major endeavour by the NATO Science Programme came to a successful conclusion.

More than three years after the first ideas about such an ambitious project were aired during the meeting of the Computer Networking Panel in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in June 2000, and exactly one year after the good news was received from the Virtual Silk Highway team that the first satellite dishes had been installed successfully in Tashkent, the set-up of the Silk Network was complete.

Over a period of one year, and ahead of the original installation schedule, all eight Silk countries have received their satellite and networking equipment and have been successfully connected to the Internet.

Following the celebratory inauguration of the satellite station in the presence of the President of the Kyrgyz Republic, H.E. Askar Akaev, in January 2003 in Bishkek (link), a whole string of events has kept the Virtual Silk Highway team excited and very busy right up to today.

The first meeting of the Silk Board, the governing body of the project, in February 2003 brought its members to Istanbul, Turkey, the home country of the project‘s satellite provider, EurasiaSat. Various guests from other organisations which had expressed their interest in participating in the project attended the meeting, including the World Bank, UNDP, the Soros Foundation, and the University of Alberta, Canada.

By the end of February 2003, two more countries had been connected to the Internet: Tajikistan (installed at Dushanbe) and Armenia (installed at Yerevan). Then, the technical team in Hamburg encountered hardware faults, in the transmitter, that needed to be corrected, which led to a delay in the next installation scheduled for Azerbaijan in mid-May. The delay, however, meant that the Azerbaijan installation coincided with a visit by NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson, to the capital Baku, and he was able to inaugurate the new connection, by participating in a successful video conference over the ‘Silk network’ with the Chair of the Board of Directors of DESY, Hamburg/Germany, Prof. Albrecht Wagner (link).

The month of June saw the members of the ‘Silk Board’ traveling for their second meeting of 2003, this time to Tbilisi, Georgia. The main event of this inauguration ceremony was a video conference over the Silk infrastructure between the Georgian President Shevardnadze in Tbilisi and Lord Robertson in Brussels, which proved that the network is capable of supporting high quality video applications (link).

The scientific and educational communities in Almaty, Kazakhstan, were the next to benefit from this capability, after their satellite ground station was installed at t the end of July, and then it was the turn of Ashgabat, Turkmenistan for the final link in the network.

This project has caught the attention of the political leadership in the benefiting countries and is also followed with interest in Russia as indicated by a letter from the Deputy Minister of Education of the Russian Federation, who congratulated NATO on the occasion of the completion of the project. The Turkman President Sapamurat Niyazov himself welcomed the participation of his country in this project.

Meanwhile, the ‘Silk Board’ does not yet consider its job completed, but is already thinking about future extensions of the ‘Silk network’ and its implications for the bandwidth, which can be afforded from the present budget. Plans for regional connectivity (outside of their capitals) are high on the priority list of the National Research and Educational Networks (NRENs) in many countries, as well as Internet connectivity for (secondary) education. One concrete example for need of regional connectivity is the ‘University of Central Asia’, also known as the ‘University of the Mountains’, which by the end of this year plans to open three campuses in mountainous regions of Tajikistan, Kyrgyz Republic and Kazakhstan.

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