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RNP finishes the year 2000 with significant advances and a new high speed backbone

RNP has faced difficulties, overcome obstacles and finished the year 2000 with a lot of positive results. The most significant events marking this period were the signature of an agreement to participate in the North American Internet2 project, in March, and the completion of the implantation of its new backbone - called RNP2 - at the end of October. This new infrastructure has raised the minimum and maximum speed levels of the national academic network from 64 Kbps and 2 Mbps respectively, to 2 Mbps and 155 Mbps. RNP2 was planned to offer support to experiments with new protocols, services and applications, besides the conventional traffic (email, web, ftp).

The new backbone, with ATM and Frame Relay technologies, provides the quality and bandwidth necessary to the new applications and tests of the academic network. More than R$ 24 million (around $13,000,000) were invested in RNP2, mainly in equipment and telecommunications services, financed both by the Interministerial Program of Implantantion and Maintenance of the National Network for Teaching and Research (Programa Interministerial de Implantação e Manutenção da Rede Nacional para Ensino e Pesquisa), signed in October 1999 by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science and Technology, and by enterprise investments encouraged by the law 10.176/2001.

The capacity of traffic exchange with Brazilian commercial networks has also been raised, improving the access to resources and systems between these networks and RNP2. The greatest improvement implemented was in the peering service with Embratel's backbone, whose speed was raised from 34 to 70 Mbps, distributed in three network access points (NAP).

High Speed International Connections with USA and Europe

Participation in the Internet2 project has been made possible by the signature of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between RNP and the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID), on March 29 . In the beginning of 2001 the updating of the international connection will be concluded. The four links of 2 Mbps currrently being used will be replaced by two high capacity connections, allowing the connection to Abilene, the major North American high performance backbone.

A 45 Mbp link between Rio de Janeiro and Florida will be offered , free of charge, by Global Crossing for three years as a result of Americas Path project (AmPath). It will be used only for interconnection and cooperation between academic networks for the development of new applications. A new connection of 155 Mbps, between Rio de Janeiro and Chicago, will permit the flow of application production traffic, that is to say, the traffic which is not associated to the experimentation and development of new protocols and network services.

A third international connection, directly to Europe, may also be established in 2001, as part of the Brazil-Germany cooperation plan for Science and Technology , connecting RNP2 to the pan-European backbone , GEANT.

Millennium Bug was overcome without difficulty

When it began, the year 2000 brought an operational menace to the National Research Network. The feared Millennium Bug was an iminent risk to the operation of the Brazilian backbone, which serves 329 teaching and research institutions as well as 15 state networks, with over 300,000 users. However, the preventive work started in 1998 and culminating with over 60 technicians on duty in several points of presence (PoPs) has prevented the backbone from stopping even once during the critical period of the Bug calendar (January and February).

[RNP, 12.22.2000]