RNP (Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa)

ISP & telecomnetworking

Brazil's national education and research network: the academic backbone created in 1989, and the infrastructure the Brazilian internet was actually built on.

The Brazilian internet started in universities, not in commerce, and the sequence is worth knowing precisely because the popular version compresses it. Before RNP existed there were separate international links: one from the national scientific computing laboratory in Rio to the University of Maryland at 9,600 bits per second, and one from São Paulo's state research foundation to Fermilab in Chicago at 4,800, running DECnet and reaching the physics and academic networks of the time. The Rio link came first, by about three months. It also mattered least. It never evolved, and was switched off in 1996 at exactly the speed it had started at, while the São Paulo link grew into the thing everything else attached to. Being first and being the one that matters are different achievements, and this is a clean example of the gap. By May 1989 the country had three disconnected islands of academic connectivity, two in Rio and one in São Paulo, which could reach each other only by going abroad and coming back. RNP was created that September to fix exactly that: build a national backbone, and spread the use of networks in a country where almost nobody had seen one. The first national TCP/IP connection followed in February 1991, the backbone carried the Rio-92 summit, and by the mid-nineties it reached most states through points of presence in their capitals with regional networks hanging off them. Then the decision that made it the country's spine rather than a university facility: in 1995 RNP began carrying commercial traffic as well as academic, and became the backbone of the Brazilian internet. It still runs the academic network, now called Rede Ipê, with a point of presence in every state and the federal district. The general lesson has nothing to do with Brazil. National internets are usually built by whoever was already connecting universities, because that community had the requirement, the international relationships and the tolerance for unreliable infrastructure a decade before anyone could sell the service.

Also known as: rede nacional de pesquisa, rede ipe, brazilian academic network

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