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Brazil’s Academic Internet is reaching a new level of speed

Connections of up to 10 Gbps will start this year

The National Network of Teaching and Research (RNP) will open this year the fifth generation of communication infrastructure that it has been operating since the early 90´s. The new network includes the project Knowledge-Network, planned by the Ministry of Science and Technology, and opened the bidding for the connections of its first ten points by electronic auction on May 13.

The winning bidders were Brasil Telecom and Embratel and contracts were signed, respectively, on June 16 and 23. It is expected is that the connections will be operational within four months after the signing of the contracts.

In the new network topology the Federal District and the states of do Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais make up the Southeast Ring, which will operate with a velocity of 10 Gbps. The other points – Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, Bahia, Pernambuco and Ceará – will reach 2.5 Gbps. It is expected that by 2007, the whole country will be connected at gigabits per second

Presented to the public at the 6th RNP Workshop, the new network will have an extremely high capacity and will permit the technological development of the country in critical areas such as telecommunications and communication and information technologies. The RNP will apply, in the branching off of the new backbone, some of the results obtained from Project Giga, an experimental network created in partnership with the Center for Research and Development in Telecommunications (CPqD) for the development of services using optical networks.

[RNP, 05.17.2005]