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Computer News No. 106, Nov-Dec 2003 |
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Computer News No. 106, Nov-Dec 2003 |
The connection between HARNET (Hongkong Academic and Research Network) and CERNET (China Education and Research Network) was first established in 1997 as a dedicated and direct link between the two Networks for facilitating communications and collaborations between the academia in Hong Kong and the China Mainland.
In 1997 when the HARNET-CERNET connection was first installed, it was a 64Kbps link. This connection was later upgraded to 2Mbps in 2000 to cope with the increase in traffic volume due to the fast growing collaborations between the academia of the two places. This 2Mbps HARNET-CERNET link has already become very congested and could not match our users' requirments for quite some time. With the continual effort of the JUCC (the Joint Universities Computer Centre which manages the development of HARNET) and CERNET, we are most delighted to announce that an agreement has been reached to upgrade the HARNET-CERNET connection from 2Mbps to 155Mbps in early 2004.
A signing ceremony was held in Beijing on November 21, 2003 to confirm this important development of the connection between CERNET and HARNET during the course of the "e-Campus Technology Workshop 2003"which was held in Beijing jointly by JUCC and the Computer & Information Management Centre, Tsinghua University.
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Professor Jianping Wu, Director of CERNET (left),
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The upgrade will increase the bandwidth of the HARNET-CERNET connection by nearly 80 times. It will certainly enable closer collaborations and partnership in academic, research and scholarly activities between the universities and higher edication institutions in Hong Kong and the Mainland.
The Network Task Force of the JUCC is now working closely with the technical staff of CERNET on the upgrade. It is our plan to put the upgraded HARNET-CERNET link into production service by February 2004.