[Podcast] Focusing purely on technology limits the understanding of Internet resilience

In this episode of PING, Nowmay Opalinski from French Institute of Geopolitics (IFG), University Paris 8 discusses his work on resilience, or rather the lack of it, confronting the Internet in Pakistan.

As discussed in his blog post, Nowmay and his IFG colleagues, and LUMS University Pakistan used a combination of technical measurements from sources such as RIPE Atlas, in a methodology devised by the GEODE project, combined with interviews in Pakistan, to explore the reasons behind Pakistan's comparative fragility in the face of seaborne fibre optical cable connectivity. The approach deliberately combines technical and social-science approaches to exploring the problem space, with quantitative data and qualitative interviews.

Located at the head of the Arabian Sea, but with only two points of connectivity to the global Internet, Pakistan has suffered over 22 'cuts' to the service in the last 20 years, However, as Nowmay explores in this episode, there actually are viable fibre connections to India close to Lahore, which are constrained by politics.

Nowmay is completing a PhD at the institute and is a member of the GEODE project. His paper on this study was presented at the 2024 AINTEC conference held in Sydney, as part of ACM SIGCOMM 2024.

Read more about GEODE, and Nowmay's work:

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