TERENA Compendium of National Research and Education Networks in Europe, 2005. FAQ for the Questionnaire

F.A.Q. for the Questionnaire for the 2005 Edition of the Compendium

Do not hesitate to submit additional questions!

The NRENs for which there is a record in the 2004 edition of the Compendium will be able to update their information and to give new information through a web-based interface. If your organisation is not already in the database and would like to be included, mail us with your organisation's abbreviated name and the country you are from, and we will create a record for you in the database and give you a login and password for submitting your data. This service is also available to NRENs from outside of the European area who would like to be included in the Compendium database. If for some reason you would prefer to work with a 'normal' questionnaire, then for you the questionnaire is here (in .rtf).

Unless otherwise specified, please provide us with the data as of the 31st of january, 2005 (or as close to that as possible).

Section one: What are these ISCED levels?
ISCED stands for International Standard Classification of Education. It is a UNESCO initiative.
Level 6 stands for the second stage of tertiary education (leading to an advanced research qualification). It typically requires the submission of a thesis or dissertation.
Level 5 stands for the first stage of tertiary education. Completion of an education at level 3 or 4 is normally required.
Level 4 stands for post-secondary non-tertiary education. This can include, for example, short vocational training programmes.
Levels 2 and 3 stand for secondary education (level 2 can also stand for the second level of basic education).
Level 1 stands for 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 from this page at UNESCO. This link should get you a PDF version of the document (in English). (The document is also available in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish).

Questions 1.4, 1.5 and 1.7: How about this disctinction between 'Universities' and 'University sites'?
In question 1.4, we would like to receive information both about the number of Universities that are connected and about the number of separate University sites that are connected (a separate site is any school, faculty, facility or group of facilities that has a separate connection to the NREN or to the local MAN, distinct from the main connection of that University).
In questions 1.5 and 1.7, we are interested only in the data for the University sites.

Section two: What do we mean by the term 'network'?
In earlier years, we wanted information here about the part of your network where aggregate traffic flows, not the access circuits. This year, we would like to receive information about the entire network that is managed by your organisation, excluding links outside your national territory.

Question 2.4 What is this core usable backbone capacity? What if I don't have a backbone?
We mean the typical core capacity of the linked nodes in the core. Some networks don't have a core backbone, for example because they have a star topology. In that case, we would be interested in knowing 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.

Question 2.6 External connections
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.

Question 3.5 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.

Section four: 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.

Section four: Staffing, FTEs
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.