• Announces

Red.es, a public entity which reports to the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism, and the European consortium DANTE recently signed a memorandum of understanding enabling the GÉANT pan-European academic network's connection between Madrid and Lisbon to be improved by using the fibre optic infrastructure of RedIRIS.

GÉANT, which is managed by DANTE, is an advanced communications network that scientists and academics from all of Europe use on a daily basis. Until this agreement was signed, GÉANT rented the use of this 10-gigabyte per second route from a private operator.

The RedIRIS-NOVA fibre optic network has been in use for several days and has led to a marked improvement in service. On the one hand, it cuts costs as GÉANT only incurs direct costs with no added margins. On the other, it is much more straightforward and cost effective to increase the capacity of this connection when researchers require higher data exchange speeds.

In order to ensure that the Madrid-Lisbon connection is effective, DANTE has also entered into a cooperation agreement with FCT-FCCN, the communications network of the Portuguese scientific community. FCT-FCCN and the Spanish RedIRIS form the fibre optic pan-Iberian academic network established between Spain and Portugal by virtue of several bilateral agreements. RedIRIS and FCT-FCCN are linked by two cross-border connections located in Extremadura and Galicia.