A satellite boost

The EWE VSAT. Photo: Syed Zakir Hossain

A launching ceremony titled "Introduction of VSAT for Advanced Learning in ICT Education" was organized at its auditorium on 11th June, 2003.

The dignitaries present on the occasion were Minister of Science, Information and Communication Technology Dr. Abdul Moyeen Khan, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) Chairman Syed Marghub Murshed and Head of Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Shahjalal University of Science and Technology Dr. Zafar Iqbal. The function was presided by Dr. Mohammed Farashuddin, president, board of directors, East West University.

The program started with the introduction of the concept of VSAT by faculty members of the CSE Department. Besides high connectivity the benefits will include greater bandwidth and delivery support of interactive media content, such as voice, video etc. In future the services will be improved to include distance learning for rural education, video conferencing and virtual classrooms, speakers said.

"It is an inspiring decision on part of the university to set up its own VSAT," said the minister.

Dr. Iqbal in his talk lauded the institution saying that the initiative would benefit not only ICT education but education as a whole.

VSAT, acronym for Very Small Aperture Terminal, is used to denote a small terrestrial based satellite. There may be multiple remotely dispersed satellites in a network connecting to a single master earth station. The other component of a VSAT network is the satellite itself, orbiting at about 36,000 km above the ground. It relays signals communicated between the VSATs and the master earth station.

In case of the university, a Hong-Kong based service provider will be responsible for the configuration, monitoring and management of the entire VSAT network. The geostationary satellite Asia Sat 3 will broadcast the signals dispatched from the ground-based master earth station to the rest of the network. The VSAT located in its premises, is directly connected to a DNS proxy server, which is in turn connected to 8 port Gigabit Switches. Twenty four port managed switch for each building connected via optical fiber backbone are linked up with the Gigabit Switches.

East West University was granted license by the BTRC for a period of five years. The organisers expressed hope that the VSAT will play a significant role in enriching the ICT education as well as ensuring increased student-teacher collaboration.