TERENA Compendium of National Research and Education Networks in Europe F.A.Q. for the 2008 Questionnaire

If you have questions not addressed in these FAQ, please send an email to compendium-2008@terena.org

Introduction

These F.A.Q. are intended to answer some of the more common questions that have been asked by staff completing previous questionnaires. We have attempted to make the questionnaire as self-explanatory and inituative as possible, however in some instance additional help may be needed.

NRENs that have completed the 2007 questionanaire will find that their data from last year is already shown in the relevant fields. If there is no chnage, just leave the data as it is, alternatively update with fresh data as appropriate.

If your NREN has not completed the NREN Compendium in earlier years there will be no record space in which you can make a return. TERENA is interested in making the Compendium more comprehensive and encourage the inclusion of new additional NRENs. If your organisation is not already in the database and if you would like to be included, mail TERENA with brief details of your organisation. You should include the full and abbreviated name of the NREN, the country and if possible the URL of your website if you have one. TERENA will then create a record for you in the database and provide you with the necessary acess rights to submit your data. NRENs from outside of the European area who would like to be included in the Compendium database are also invited to complete the survey.

Once you have a USERNAME and PASSWORD, you are able to log into the survey pages. You will initially find yourself in viewing mode. To enter editing mode in which you can add/change data, you need to press the EDIT button.

At the end of every section, there are two buttons: 'SAVE' and 'CANCEL'. If you press 'CANCEL', your new entries do not get saved to the database and will be lost. If you press 'SAVE', the answers will be saved in the database. It is recommend that you press the 'SAVE' from time to time so as to avoid loss of data through any timeouts that might affect your connection.

After you complete a section, please review it. If you are happy with it, please press the 'MAKE FINAL' button that you can see at the top and bottom of every section when you are not in editing mode. The word 'preliminary' in the background will then disappear, we will review your submission and either contact you if we have additional questions and/or make it public.

As in last years questionnaire, some of the sub-questions that you will be asked are conditional upon your answers to the main questions. You will only see the sub-questions relevent to your main question answer.

If prefer to work with a printed questionnaire, an RTF version of the document can be DOWNLOADED and printed.

Notes on completion of the questionnaire

1. Validity Date of Answers

Unless otherwise specified, please provide us with the data as of the 31st of January, 2008 (or as close to that as possible).

2. Definition of ISCED levels

ISCED Is the UNESCO scheme for International Standard Classification of Education:

  • Level 6 Second stage of tertiary education (leading to an advanced research qualification). It typically requires the submission of a thesis or dissertation.
  • Level 5 First stage of tertiary education. Completion of an education at level 3 or 4 is normally required.
  • Level 4 Post-secondary non-tertiary education. This can include, for example, short vocational training programmes.
  • Levels 2 and 3 Secondary education (level 2 can also stand for the second level of basic education).
  • Level 1 Primary or basic education.

In theory, your Ministry of Education sends information to UNESCO about the educational sector in your country on a regular basis. Therefore, they should be able to tell you what types of institutions in your country fall in which category. They should also know how many institutions of each category there are.

More information is available on the ISCED calssification can be obtained from the UNESCO website UNESCO website or by downloading the document (in English).

3. What do we mean by the term 'network' in Questionaire Section B

We would like to receive information about the entire network that is managed by your organisation, excluding links outside your national territory.

In this context the 'NREN' means staff directly employed in the NREN and organisations/insitutions subcontracted to carry out work on behalf of the NREN.

4. For question B.1.1.6 what is to be taken as CORE

In the context of this questionnaire the term CORE should be taken to mean usable backbone capacity. If yor network does not have a backbone core (for instance because it is a star network) please report the maximum capacity into the central node of your network.

Some NRENs have dark fiber with a very high theoretical capacity. In that case, we would like to know the usable IP capacity.

5. Questions on External Connections - B.1.1.8, B.1.1.9, B.1.1.10

Note that we are interested in the capacity for production purposes, not in any additional links that may be there for the purpose of giving resilience. Some of your capacity to Europe may be used for transiting to intercontinental services; please do NOT subtract for that.

6. Question B.1.2.5 Congestion

We would like to get your best estimate of congestion levels. For example, if the MRTG trace of an access line is at the line bandwidth for long periods, or if the router interface shows lots of packet drops, then there's congestion in the access network. That one is obvious. But how do you know if the bottleneck (if there is one) is in the campus LAN?

You may need to look inside the campus network, or at least at the ethernet port of their edge router. If a big university cannot use more than ~4Mbps of an E3 or STM-1 access line, they may be limited by a 10Mbps ethernet somewhere in their LAN.

We do expect NRENs to have some idea of the state of their network, particularly on the existence and location of bottlenecks. This could come either from constant monitoring or by using tools like clink or pingplotter.

7. Section C: Budget questions

Please do not hesitate to use as much space as needed here to clarify your national situation!

Please let us know if you think your budgetary situation is special in comparison to other NRENs. That can help in presenting the data to the outside world in a way that at least shows the complexities of working with this figure.

8. Section C: Staffing

Please do not include staff that is entirely working for activities not directly related to networking for research or education, eg. the budget for activities such as Domain Name registration services for parties outside the NREN.

About subcontracted staff: this may be difficult for some to answer, for example because you have subcontracted services and do not really need to know how many FTEs are needed for providing the service. If this is the case, then please try to give an estimate and note your problems in the remarks section. We need this information in order to allow some comparison between NRENs.