TERENA Compendium of National Research and Education Networks in Europe
Procedure and F.A.Q. for the 2011 Questionnaire

If you have any questions not addressed in these FAQ, please send an email to Bert van Pinxteren at the TERENA Secretariat.

Procedure

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 inituitive as possible, however in some instance additional help may be needed.

NRENs that have completed the 2010 questionanaire will find that some of their data from last year is already shown in the relevant fields. If there is no change, just leave the data as it is, alternatively update with fresh data as appropriate.

Start the process as follows:

  • Request a password for your organisation. Scroll to your organisation in the drop-down list, enter your e-mail address and press the 'request a password' button. Note that this is not an automated process - all password requests are reviewed by a human being, so it may take a little while before you receive your password. Note that it is entirely possible that several staff of your NREN each get their own password.
  • If your NREN has not completed the NREN Compendium in earlier years there will be no record for it in the database an no obvious way of requesting a password. If your organisation would like to be included, mail us 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. TERENA will then create a record for you in the database so that you can get a password.
  • Go to the login page and follow the instructions you'll find there.

As in last year's questionnaire, some of the sub-questions are conditional upon your answers to the main questions. You will only see the sub-questions relevant to your answer to the main question.

If you prefer to work with a printed questionnaire, a .doc version of the document can be DOWNLOADED soon and printed.

Notes on completion of the questionnaire

1. Which base date?

Unless otherwise specified, please provide us with the data as of the 31st of January, 2011 (or as close to that as possible).

2. What are 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 classification can be obtained from the 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.11, 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.12 etc.

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. Questions on the types of traffic

Some unclarity may arise because the NREN itself is a source and destination of traffic.

An NREN's ftp servers, data servers, multi-media repositories, Akamai servers etc. are all connected to the NREN network just like clients. For the purposes of the Compendium traffic data, they can be considered as clients. So the 'Customer connections cloud' on the left-hand side of the diagram includes customer sites and the NREN traffic generators and sinks.

Some of the traffic from customers and the NREN servers goes to other customers; not all of it goes to 'all external networks and peerings'. This traffic appears on the NREN network, and then goes back to the clients and the NREN servers, along with traffic from external networks and peerings.

Thus, T1 traffic is greater than T3 traffic, since some of the T1 traffic stays within the NREN community and does not go to external networks.
T4 is external traffic that goes to the customers, but it combines with the inter-client traffic to form T2.

This leads to the following relationships:

T4 + (T1 - T3) = T2

or

T4 + T1 = T2 + T3

7. Question C.3 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.

8. What are these technologies mentioned in question D.1?

FTTH - Fibre to the Home
FTTO - Fibre to the Office

Other spectrum: any form of wireless networking that requires either a licensed use of part of the radio spectrum or a use for which no license is needed in your country.