It is not only Hungary’s residential internet users who are getting faster internet speeds as internet networks are progressively upgraded. The same is true for Hungary’s academic institutions – except that they have it 20,000 times faster than the type of broadband we use at home.
“This development can be compared to widening a four-lane highway to a 16-lane super-highway,” says Róbert Budafoki, managing director of Cisco Systems Hungary Kft, the systems vendor for a recently completed project for NIIFI – the National Information Infrastructure Development Office.
On Feb. 25, Hungary’s leading telecom, Matáv Rt, and representatives of Cisco Systems officially inaugurated the national backbone network that now provides turbo-speed internet access for the Budapest headquarters of NIIFI. It will also support seven universities, which operate as regional network centers, and several other research and educational institutions.
The new network, of which Matáv is the service provider, will help ensure reliable access to the GEANT2 computer network, a pan-European research network supported by the European Union, for nearly 600,000 users of NIIFI in almost 700 institutions, according to Matáv and Cisco representatives.
The newly launched service is capable of transmitting data, voice and video traffic at a speed of up to 10 Gbps – a fourfold increase on the network’s previous capability.
Hungary is the first country in Central and Eastern Europe to have a nationwide 10 Gbps network. The newly inaugurated beefed-up backbone is a further development of the 2.5 Gbps network, implemented in 2001. It is some 5,000 times faster than a large bank’s backbone network, according to Cisco officials.
In the past three years, NIIFI has launched several new services for the academic community. These include voice over IP telephony, video conferencing, GRID computing – which allows the sharing of information across different geographical areas – and a national directory. As a result of these, traffic has multiplied, says Zoltán Tankó, deputy CEO of Matáv’s business solutions division.
Ultimately, the goal is to offer equal opportunities in terms of computer networking resources to all institutions, whether in Budapest or elsewhere in the country, promises Miklós Nagy, director of the Hungarian NREN.
“The current DWDM [optical dark fibre] infrastructure broadens opportunities to communicate and access information nationwide, which is of extreme importance for Hungary both with regard to achieving eEurope targets, as well as connecting to the European Research Region,” he says.
He adds that with the successful implementation of this project, NIIFI is able to bolster Hungary’s relationship with major EU research and development centers. It also hands the opportunity to the Hungarian research community to better participate in global research projects.
Matáv first managed a leased line for NIIFI in 1995.
Source: BBJ
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21.03.2005