Bandwidth Management and Optimisation

In 2007, INASP put in place a Bandwidth Management and Optimisation programme to support institutions to address the technical barriers that can affect their access e-resources.

The activities across the project included:

• Five-day workshops for ICT staff to develop advanced network management skills, including network design, network administration and bandwidth management and optimization.
• Workshops with managers and policymakers around building supportive policy environments and policy development frameworks, reviewing existing bandwidth and acceptable use policies, creating institutional action plans.
• Locally led follow on workshops cascading to institutions within each country.
• Diagnostic and technical troubleshooting visits to higher education institutions.
• A pan-African strategic planning workshop.
• Publication of a handbook on How to Accelerate Your Internet: A practical guide to Bandwidth Management and Optimisation, with over 6000 full-text download in the first two months.
• Advocacy work and immersive bandwidth sessions with journal publishers in order to make their publications more accessible in low-bandwidth environments.
• Seminars with key national research and education networks in Africa and at international meetings and conferences.
• Research for and publication of case studies.

All training materials and reports are available through an open access license online.

Achievements

• Key academic publishers redesigned their sites to be more accessible in low-bandwidth environments.
• Institutions adjusted local network design and policy to allocate more network capacity to the library to allow easier access to online information resources.
• Institutional policy makers engaged in collaborative bandwidth policy development at institutional and national research and education network levels.
• New and revised network and computer use (bandwidth focused) institutional policies put in place.
• Best practice made available including: The cheapest way to get more bandwidth—managing email and network resources in Botswana and Zimbabwe; Library Web caching for better bandwidth usage in Rwanda; UbuntuNet Alliance for research and education networking—better collaboration between NRENs in East Africa; NREN and libraries collaboration on bandwidth management in Kenya and Uganda; University campus computer network design, implementation and bandwidth management capacity’ in Bolivia and Nicaragua; Hidden Cost of Webmail: guidelines on managing bandwidth in relation to Webmail bandwidth usage.