As per the plan, field visit on Nepal Telecom Exchange Centre at Jawalakhel, Kathmandu on 07th of January 2021 AD, 11:00 AM was successfully accomplished. Ten students from batch 26 “B”, 1. Sharad Bhandari, 2. Amrit Pangeni, 3. Anil Chettri, 4. Madhav Kanel, 5. Kritika Sijali, 6. Riya Shrestha, 7. Bishesh Shrestha, 8. Simran Shiris, 9. Sachin Chaulagai and 10. Utsav Aryal, participated and Mr. Bhas Raj Pathak Sir (HOD of Ethical Hacking and Cyber Security) & Mr. Anup Gyawali Sir were on the premises to guide students throughout the visit.
At first, we were introduced to Senior Engineer Mr Nimish Pandey (Core Engineer) who guided us towards the internal technical infrastructure of the premises. There were about 11 high powered big server rack units which were powered through under the floor with many backup UPS and battery for any incident handling. The battery and UPS system is very heavy, so it was best to set up a lab on the ground floor. Operating system used inside the system was based on Unix OS kernel which is customized by vender as per required by Nepal telecom’s functionality and daily usages. The server room was physically secured by a security guard for verification of authorization inside the server room. Additionally, physical padlocks, automatic magnetic lock as well as fingerprint scanner were also implemented for the best security of that critical infrastructure. As the devices are running 24×7, the room temperature should always be maintained due to a large amount of heat dissipation. So, Heat Ventilation and Air Condition system (HVAC) is implemented throughout the server room. Furthermore, the sound produced by the HVAC system’s fan makes high-frequency sound is neutralized using glass wool boards on the wall of the server room to make it soundproof. As the server room was in the ground floor, anti-rodent devices were used to prevent any kinds of rats which can cause wire damage.
There are about five similar server centres throughout the country in all developing regions. They are set up to balance the load in any situation of the incident to make sure that the services are not disrupted for the customers. As per stated by Nimish Sir, in any case of an incident, the voice traffic is prioritized among other services since it uses less bandwidth and makes sure the customer at least can flow the traffic. All the server were so compact as well as powerful, which was able to manage the layer 2 networking and packet forwarding using optical fiber network which was totally based on Optical Distribution Network (ODN) which is one of the fastest and highly reliable than copper-based technologies with was previously used.
We also had a Question Answers session where a student was able to get so much information about the methodology they work on. Honestly, the session was a complete success with so much experience of the real-world industry and its framework. We hope these kinds of exposure is given to all the students in our college and help us enhance our experience with such learning methods.