Search for: All records

The arrival of undersea cables along the coasts of Africa over the last decade, combined with increased investment in national fiber backbones, has expedited the development of NRENs across the African continent. According to a World Bank report, there are now more than 15 NRENs operating in Africa and a dozen more in an advanced planning stage. In addition, recent investments have been made by governments and NGOs to use this new infrastructure to help connect researchers around the world to their colleagues in Africa. As part of its International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program, the US National Science Foundation is funding transatlantic bandwidth, targeted training, and pro-active application engagement in support of science collaborations in Africa. Similarly, the European Commission, via GEANT¹s AfricaConnect2 project, is providing support for the development of high-capacity internet networks and services for research and education across Africa. This increased support is helping improve connectivity for existing science collaborations while also enabling new collaborations to take advantage of the growing Research and Education infrastructure. This session will highlight how the global R & E networking community is working together to strengthen and support NRENs and research in Africa. Speakers will include IRNC PIs, representatives from GEANT, and African REN partners (Ubuntunet Alliance, WACREN, ASREN). Speakers will provide infrastructure updates, lessons learned from human capacity building workshops, reports on researcher engagement, and answer questions about current and future efforts. We will also highlight some of the challenges African NRENs and researchers working in Africa face and lead a discussion on how we can work together to begin addressing some of these challenges. 

Americas Africa Research and eduCation Lightpaths (AARCLight) is a project, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), to conduct a feasibility study for the planning, designing, and defining a strategy for high capacity research and education network connectivity between the U.S. and West Africa. We propose to report on the findings from year 1 of the study. The study focuses on the following four areas of inquiry: The planned availability of submarine cable capacity in the South Atlantic for use by R&E communities; the demand for network services between the U.S. and West Africa by the R&E communities; the coordination of efforts by the U.S., nations of Africa, and Brazil to coordinate planning efforts to strategically make use of the offered network capacity towards serving the broadest communities of interest in research and education; and the planned activities for human capacity development in Angola and nations of west Africa for the effective use of the inter-regional network capacity to support the inter-regional R&E communities.