The Junta de Andalucía promotes this year the renewal and expansion of the RICA communication network, which will allow to increase the bandwidth of 10 to 100 gigabits.
Domestic users, companies or administrations use the conventional version of the Internet, deployed and managed by the large telephone operators, for the online performance of their activities and services. But outside of this commercial network there is a high-capacity, more advanced, faster and more powerful communication infrastructure in which information travels not in megabits but in gigabits and whose access is restricted to the general public. This ‘super internet’ can only be used by the Andalusian scientific and academic community.
It’s called RCIA, the acronym for Scientific Computer Network of Andalusia, and through a mesh of 3,100 kilometers of fiber optics and ten nodes or Points of Presence (PdP) interconnects the ten public universities and 45 centers and organizations also of a public nature that carry out their work in the Andalusian territory.
Thanks to this deployment and coverage of the regional map, with PdP in all the provinces, its members have the advanced connectivity and network services necessary to carry out their work and collaborate with each other remotely.
RICA and the services provided through it are coordinated and managed by the Ministry of Economic Transformation, Industry, Knowledge and Universities, through the Andalusian Scientific Computer Center (CICA), designed to provide services to the regional knowledge system. Its current relevance is essential for promoting innovation in the academic and scientific field and for the development of e-Science in the community.
This update will allow the bandwidth currently available to universities and research centers to be multiplied by up to tensince the computer mesh will go from connection interfaces of ten gigabits per second, scalable up to 40, to have a capacity of up to 100 gigabits per second.
of it The 2,129 research groups attached to academic institutions and research infrastructures as relevant and unique as the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, based in Granada, or the Calar Alto Observatory, in Almería, will benefit.; as well as the CSIC centers. All these agents are at the forefront of knowledge and try to respond to key scientific challenges for the progress of Andalusian society.
The total investment to carry out the intervention has been estimated at more than 2.4 million euroswhich will be financed entirely with the Next Generation Funds from the European Union. The Ministry will also provide all the technical work that will be necessary to complete the renovation and extension of the scientific infrastructure successfully.
The Andalusian structure is designed with two exits to the outside, which enables its union with the state RedIRIS-NOVA -the evolution of RedIRIS- and, thanks to this interconnection, it can come into contact with the rest of the academic networks and research from other European countries and with the pan-European GÉANT. This relationship even goes beyond the European border and allows collaboration with research groups from the US, Canada or Japan and countries in Latin America, Asia or Africa.
