Cisco Inks Deal To Upgrade World's Largest Educational Network

Cisco has signed a deal to supply the China Education and Research Network (CERNET) with CRS-1 Carrier Routing System hardware for its upgrade of the world's largest educational network.

CERNET serves some 20 million users at more that 1000 universities and research facilities in China and is also part of the country's Internet backbone. The network will deploy the Cisco CRS-1 in its core network nodes in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Nanjing as part of a general upgrade of the national backbone network. With the upgrade, CERNET expects to improve overall network performance and provide support for resource-hungry advanced applications.

The CRS-1 is designed to provide continuous operations and flexibility to enable reliable large-scale delivery of high-bandwidth applications. The system's capacity to route 92 terabits of data per second is particularly attractive to CERNET, given the rapid growth of China's broadband market and the massive size -- more than 100 million users -- of its Internet user base.

"Cisco is proud to continue our cooperation with CERNET and support the ongoing development and innovation of the Internet in China," Cisco President of Asia Pacific Operations Owen Chan said in a statement. "We are very pleased to have been selected by CERNET as they expand the capacity of China's leading education and research network."