Center
of Excellence for Internet Technologies to established in Islamabad

A Center of Excellence for Internet Technologies is being
established in Islamabad in collaboration with PTCL, NUST and Cisco. To be set up in the 800 acre H-12
campus of NUST, the Center is the brainchild of Mr Walid Irshaid, President and
CEO, PTCL. An MoU to this effect was signed yesterday
by the three parties, with the Chief Guest being Dr Ata ur Rahman, Chairman HEC.

Mr Walid Irshaid, speaking on the occasion, said that
Etiselat is keenly aware of its obligations towards the Pakistani technical
community, and that by setting up such a Center, PTCL
will be able to benefit from world class research that will be of immense value
not just to PTCL but also to the wider Etiselat group
of companies. In addition, the human resources that will be developed at this
Center will be able to export their skills and expertise to the region and
beyond. This will spur growth in the Pakistani IT sector, and will contribute
towards enhancing the quality and quantity of exportable IT related skills to
the global marketplace.

Mr Samer Alkharrat, Managing Director for Gulf and Pakistan, Cisco Systems, further elaborated
upon the importance of such a Center and said that this initiative is one
of a kind in Pakistan. No other global technology company
has teamed up with any Pakistani institution to conduct cutting edge research
of relevance to industry, he elaborated. The collaboration with PTCL is essential to ensuring that the research carried out
at the Center is relevant to industry, and the Center will benefit enormously
from the hands on expertise that exists within PTCL
to manage and optimize large scale IP networks.  

The Center, staffed by
researchers from NUST, will work closely with Cisco and PTCL
to define areas of research that would have applicability to developing
countries in particular. The actual research itself will be carried out at
Pakistani universities, with engineers from Cisco in the US providing the overall thematic
direction of the research. One such research project is already underway, with
funding provided by the National ICT R&D Fund and research scientists from
Cisco teaming up professors at a Pakistani University to develop open source tools for
performance monitoring of network traffic. An application for a US patent is being filed as a result
of the work carried out during the course of that research.

"NUST has a well established tradition of joint
research projects with some of the world's best known universities, but
collaborating on research that is cutting edge in terms of its industrial
relevance will open up a new chapter in our research", said Lt
Gen Mohammad Asghar, Rector NUST during his remarks.

In addition to research, the Center will also provide high
end professional training courses to PTCL and other
telecom companies. With the convergence of voice, data and video, the
complexity involved in managing such networks increases exponentially and hence
these highly technical courses and certifications will be of immediate value to
Pakistani engineers. Funding for the research conducted at the Center will be
provided by the National ICT R&D Fund. Dr Qasim Sheikh, CEO of the Fund
added that this particular area of ICT is of critical importance to Pakistan and the Fund is extremely pleased
to see PTCL and Cisco join hands with NUST to
create a research group in this area.