NAYATEL: BANDWIDTH to the rescue!!





Unlike greed, more bandwidth is always good. No exceptions. Already with a decreasing cushion on our 200Mbps or so of bandwidth, we upped the TW1 today to 155Mbps. Gee, that should last a while :-). And an STM-4 is in the works to make Nayatel the Service Provider.

Controlling outbound traffic from the AS with a Core such as ours is no mean feat with mission-critical businesses always looking for an oppurtunity to kick-ass and claim SLAs.

I'll post the slides here once I finalize the policies for outbound traffic.

Cheers!

Urdu Ghazal and it's Singers

I'll spare you the torture but Urdu Ghazal and it's nuances are truly addictive. More on that in another posting later.

If you are into Urdu Ghazal, surely Anup Jalota is a name that stands out. Famous for his Hindi Bhajans, I was introduced to his work long time back in 1989 when a friend handed a cassette (yeah CDs were not very in back then).

Anup's rendition of Urdu is superb and immaculate. Although, I've caught many a mistakes of pronunciation (yeah, I live near to the Muqtadara Qaumi Zubaan :-) ) in Jagjeet Singh's Albums, not so with Anup.

Here's one of his beautifully sung ghazals. I don't know who's ghazal it is. I suspect it to be of Mahir ul Qadri's but not sure. Beautifully rendered.

You can find more about Anup at his website http://www.anupjalotaonline.com/



This is a long ghazal. If you're not into this genre, skip it. (c) 2007 Anup Jalota

Adnan Sami's Works
Alright. Big Deal. So I like Adnan's work in addition to NFAK's. Here's a cool one from the archives. Hope you'll enjoy it.



Make sure you have the latest Adode Macromedia FLASH installed on your PC. There's no volume control in this plug-in. So, use your PC's Audio control. Song (c) Adnan Sami Khan

The Joys of BLOGGING
Well, I was too busy to update the blog. Now that I've made a few postings, I've realized that not having a camera in the cell phone is a big No from a blogging perspective. After getting rid of the my old imate, life with Nokia 9300i is good. But it looks like i'll have to get a Nokia N95 or the Nokia E90 for the BLOG as I can't carry a cam and a cell phone at the same time.

Adding to my misery these days is GOOD MILK, a new idiotic brand of doodh in the market. Now milking goats and cows might be a fetish for some but gladly I do not fall into that category :-). From the moment i turn on GEO News, GOOD MILK and it's curvacious lineup of heavenly bodies make me feel like pulling my hair for watching such pathetic ads. Sheer Visual Torture. A fat-ass lady first slams the refrigerator door.... and then girls cycling in the rain drink GOOD MILK!. Way to go GOOD MILK. I give the CUCKOO of the YEAR advertisement award to thee! :-)

The Capital Development Authority (CDA - I would love to change this C from Capital to a more apt description :p) and Worldcall are two strange bedfellows. They have already dug the Blue Area and a few other sectors in order to lay down the ducts which will be used by any carrier to lay down their fiber optic cables. After getting Nayatel to dig the Blue Area footpaths (as the telecom corridor is underneath the footpath), the CDA moved their own telecom corridor four feet from the edge of the footpath. So where they got Nayatel to spend a million Rs on the restoration, they can get away with the fraction of the amount! But alas such is life in the land of the pure!

TW1 Islamabad Goes Live!

Finally, the GigabitEthernet connectivity between Nayatel and TW1 is up. We shifted our traffic to TW1 to check out how well it performs.

I can reach Yahoo.com in only 11 hops now! not to mention that the idiotic policy of PTCL's ITI i.e. blocking of voice ports and video ports is not followed by TW1.

Imagine this: a customer needs to do video conferencing between Islamabad and (say) Dubai or Egypt. With PTCL's ITI, this requires a week long red-tape procedure involving every tom, dick and harry right from the ITI NOC to the General Manager and EVP. Certainly no way to treat premium customers like us :-).