US$50 million upgrade provides students and schools with ultra-wideband communications network with 10-fold increase in transmission speeds
TAIPEI, Taiwan - June 18, 2002 - Taiwan Academic Network (TANet), the national teaching and research network co-developed by major universities and the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan, has selected equipment from Cisco Systems, the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, to upgrade its backbone network.
The extensive upgrade transforms TANet's Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) backbone into a Gigabit metropolitan-area network (MAN) that connects schools and research institutes at all levels -- universities, senior high, junior high and elementary schools. The national network will have a maximum backbone bandwidth of 40 Gigabits per second (Gbps).
TANet is the region's largest academic network, providing Internet access and network support to the island's schools and educational institutions. Through the continuous upgrade of TANet, the MOE and Taiwan's major universities have created a powerful academic platform to accelerate the use of the Internet among students and further enhance the global competitiveness of Taiwan's research institutes.
As part of its goal of constructing an information highway for educational institutions in Taiwan, TANet's Gigabit MAN backbone network allows for more efficient resource sharing among local and regional academic institutions. The network will also support advanced Internet-based academic tools such as distance learning, multimedia and videoconferencing.
"To achieve the goals of sharing our resources and narrowing the digital gap between rural and urban areas of Taiwan, the MOE has continuously promoted Internet learning. That, however, places a heavy burden on network traffic," said Ms. Chung Yu Sho, Manager of Network Department, Ministry of Education. "The gigabit scalability and high availability offered by the Gigabit Ethernet solution built around Cisco's technologies address the national academic network's need for higher bandwidth, allowing rapid proliferation of advanced educational tools like distance learning and multimedia applications."
Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches have been extensively installed at the regional network centres of TANet, which include 12 national universities, Academia Sinica, the National Center of High-Performance Computing at the National Science Council, as well as Taipei and Kaohsiung county and city government.
Designed for a server-aggregation environment, the Catalyst 6509 switch provides a wide range of IP multicast applications, data applications and other mission-critical applications using scalable bandwidth for group sharing. Coupled with the services of Cisco IOS software, the Catalyst 6509 can further support the architecture necessary to handle high-density gigabit switching as well as the multi-layer intelligence to manage Internet traffic.
Larry Sun, Country Manager, Cisco Systems Taiwan, said, "We are very pleased that technology developed by Cisco has been selected by TANet for this important national project. We believe that the network will play an important role in keeping Taiwan at the forefront in education and offer students, educators and administrators a world-class infrastructure to support their academic pursuits."
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