SANET – Slovak Multigigabit Network for Research and Education
SANET association builds its data network since 1992. In the very beginning, POPs at universities were connected by leased lines, which couldn’t met the bandwidth and reliability requirements of academic users.
The situation significantly changed in 2001, when SANET introduced new strategy and started to build its infrastructure based on leased or self-owned dark fibre with IP over Ethernet on top of it. This strategy enabled SANET to increase its backbone capacity by a factor of 500 during one year and created the necessary framework for further capacity upgrades in 2007 a 2015 just by replacing the network equipment.
SANET network currently interconnects 36 Slovak cities. External connectivity is accomplished by 3 dark fibre routes interconnecting SANET with Czech Republic, Austria and Poland, connection to pan-European research and educational network GEANT as well as connection to commodity internet via Benestra in Bratislava.
High-capacity interconnections to neighbour countries were achieved thanks to close cooperation with research and educational networks ACONET, CESNET & PIONIER and created an excellent framework for further cooperation of SANET members with their foreign partners in the fields of science, research and education.
SANET backbone network currently provides 2×100 Gb/s or 10 Gb/s of capacity; upgrades to 2×100 Gb/s for further links are in preparation. Installed technology enables SANET to increase backbone capacity to 5×100 Gb/s by purchasing corresponding licences without the need to acquire and install any additional equipment.
SANET association aims to provide high-quality services to all its members and ensure maximal throughput and reliability. For this reasons, multi-ring backbone topology is used, which guarantees resilience of POP connectivity during fibre cuts or other problems.
All packets in the backbone are routed via shortest possible paths, which ensures minimal network latency required for maximal end-to-end throughput for every application. Shortest-path routing for all packets at ethernet level is provided by TRILL protocol, which also enables native L2VPN services without the need to implement MPLS.
SANET network is connected to Slovak Internet eXchange (www.six.sk) at 20Gb/s, which provides high-quality connectivity to other internet users in Slovakia.
Thanks to agreements with NRENs in Czech Republic, Austria and Poland, SANET exchanges traffic via internet exchanges in those countries, which further improves accessibility of various internet resources.
The following map shows the current SANET backbone topology:
