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RNP participates in Ampath workshop in Florida

On January 29th to 31st, RNP participated in Ampath Workshop: Fostering Collaborations and Next Generation Infrastructure, which took place at Florida International University, in Miami. The aim of this meeting was to gather the members of Ampath and other interested people so that they could exchange ideas and consolidate the ongoing collaboration work.

Representing RNP, there were Michael Stanton, RNP's Innovations director, Alexandre Grojsgold, RNP's operation manager, Guido Lemos, coordinator of the Digital Video Working Group, and Liane Tarouco, coordinator of the Education through Networks Working Group. Besides RNP, Brazil was represented by professors from Uerj, UFCG, Unicamp and USP. The lectures presented included themes such as optical networks, distance learning, science, flaw management, and collaboration with the European networks.

"The presence of Brazil was remarkable, for all of us were lecturers, participants in panel discussions or session coordinators," stressed Michael Stanton, who took part in the panel discussion "What will Optical Networking for the Americas look like? ". He talked about the advantages of replacing copper by optical fiber and presented three examples in Brazil of experiences in this field: the network of the Federal Fluminense University (Universidade Federal Fluminense), in Niterói, the ReMAV in Curitiba and Giga Project.

On the last day of the workshop, Guido Lemos presented an interactive TV program, which was watched at the same time in Natal (RN) and Miami. For the transmission to be possible, RNP configured an exclusive 10 Mbps link between its Points of Presence in Natal and Rio de Janeiro. From Rio de Janeiro to Miami, the transmission was made through the 45 Mbps link donated to RNP by Ampath. The experiment was implemented to work on a Java platform, which enables the transmission both to digital TV sets and to "set-top boxes" (devices capable of decoding digital signals).

A network for Latin America

Nowadays, Ampath operates with only three South American countries: Brazil, Argentina and Chile. This is not good enough for a project whose aim is to interconnect the education and research networks in South and Central America to the Internet2 project. According to Michael Stanton, one of the difficulties of Ampath is related to its rigid model, which maintains the same 45 Mbps connection in the entire network, regardless of the political, cultural, social and economic characteristics of each country. "For countries such as Nicaragua, this initiative ends up not being economically interesting since its cost is higher than necessary," states Stanton.

RNP's Innovation director suggests a more feasible alternative: the Latin American Cooperation on Advanced Networks (Clara). This was one of the themes of his second lecture, in Joint Techs Workshop, an event in the scope of the Internet2 project that followed Ampath Workshop. This meeting also took place in Florida, between February 2nd and 5th.

The Clara initiative gathers the education and research networks of the countries in the region to offer services to advanced networks. Its aim is to create an interconnection infrastructure for the Latin American networks that can also be connected to Europe and the USA. The traffic in this network shall vary between 10 and 45 Mbps, according to the needs of each country.

[RNP, 02.21.2003]