Infovia Brasília

networkingISP & telecom

The Brazilian federal government's own metropolitan network in Brasília, running on state-owned fibre and operated by Serpro exclusively for public bodies.

The Brazilian federal government's own metropolitan network in Brasília, on state-owned fibre, operated for public bodies only - a private network in the strict physical sense.

Twenty years old and almost unknown outside the people who use it, which is the ordinary condition of working infrastructure. The design decision that matters is ownership: the fibre belongs to a ministry rather than to a carrier, and the network is operated by the state data-processing company for government entities only. That makes it a private network in the strict sense - not a virtual private network riding somebody else's infrastructure, but physically separate cable that no commercial operator touches. The reasoning is the same as the reasoning behind military satellite systems and behind the Telebrás monopoly before privatisation: an organisation that cannot survive its supplier changing terms, being acquired, or being compelled by a foreign jurisdiction will eventually build its own. What it now carries goes well beyond connectivity - hosting, colocation, cloud services and custom networks for digital government - which is the predictable trajectory. A network built for one purpose acquires services because the network is already there and already trusted, and the marginal cost of adding something to infrastructure you already operate is far below the cost of procuring it. That is also the risk: everything ends up depending on one network, and its protection becomes a national concern rather than an operational one. Which is exactly what happened after a wave of attacks on federal sites, when responsibility for defending it was assigned explicitly rather than assumed.

Also known as: infovia, serpro infovia

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