Latvia is first among the Baltic states to establish a 100Gb/s connection to GÉANT - the pan-European network for scientific excellence, research, education and innovation.
This year marks the 20th anniversary since the creation of GÉANT - a fundamental element of Europe’s e-infrastructure, delivering the pan-European GÉANT network for scientific excellence, research, education and innovation. GÉANT brings together National Education and Research Networks (NRENs) to provide direct communications between millions of academic users. At the beginning of the academic network 20 years ago, Latvia's connection to the GÉANT network was only able to provide speeds of 34 Mb/s. Over time, technologies were developed, and in March 2021, Latvia's connection to GÉANT was upgraded from 10Gb/s to 100 Gb/s. By comparison, Estonia and Lithuania still use speeds of 40 Gb/s with plans to increase speeds to 100 Gb/s within a year.
Improvements in connection speeds enable Latvian academic users to establish direct, high-capacity connections with other academic users in Europe, which allows them to implement joint projects in various fields of science, such as radio astronomy, biomedicine, genetic engineering.
Modernization of the GÉANT connection was carried out within the framework of closer cooperation between the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Latvia, the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the University of Latvia, and SIA Mikrotīkls, which has led the establishment of the Genomics Data Network (GDN). SIA Mikrotīkls provided the Latvian academic network with the necessary equipment to successfully upgrade the connection in a short period of time, demonstrating the quality and performance of Latvian networking hardware.