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About us Press releases 2023 30 years of the CESNET network year by year

30 years of the CESNET network year by year

Clock icon 15. June 2023
1990 Czechoslovakia joins the American university network BITNET.
1991 Experimental connection of Czechoslovakia to the Internet, which connects universities, scientific and research institutions.
1992 On 13 February Czechoslovakia formally connected to the Internet at the Czech Technical University in Prague.
1993 On 15 June the nationwide CESNET backbone network is launched, initially with two centres in Prague and Brno connected by a fixed line with a capacity of 64 Kbps. The network is operated by the CTU in Prague.
1994  The first commercial Internet providers in the Czech Republic. For the first time in Eastern Europe, a major INET´94/JENC5 congress organised by The Internet Society and RARE international associations takes place in Prague with the support of CESNET.
1996  Establishment of the CESNET association, which takes the network operation over from CTU. The association soon wins the tender and starts building an academic network with a connection to the European TEN-34. ATM circuits connecting individual nodes have a capacity of 34 Mbps. The NIX.CZ peering node is being established in the Czech Republic with the participation of CESNET. MetaCentrum for demanding calculations is created.
1997 The backbone network with a transmission speed of 34 Mbps is put into operation.
1998 The Internet network continues to expand. It has connections to 80 countries and over a million users. CESNET participates in the establishment of the national .cz domain administrator – the CZ.NIC association. The MetaCentrum comes under the administration of the CESNET association.
1999 Boycott action against Telecom is taking place in the Czech Republic as a result of the announced increase in telephone charges. CESNET wins the tender and builds the TEN-155 CZ network with connection to the European TEN-155.
2000 CESNET starts to use the 2.5 Gb/s data circuit between Prague and Brno for its network. The association starts to build the CESNET2 network. Most of its circuits should have a capacity of 2.5 Gb/s.
2001 The CESNET2 backbone network connects via gigabit technology to the trans-European GÉANT network – the fastest academic network in the world. There is one 10 Gb/s circuit to the Czech Republic and two more at 2.5 Gb/s.
2002 The Nothing in-line (NIL) concept aims to operate fibre-optic links without equipment on the route. CESNET ranks among its promoters globally with the deployment of the first production NIL route.
2003 IP version 6 is deployed in the CESNET2 backbone network. Networks built and operated by subscribers on leased dark fibre – CEF (Customer Empowered Fibre) networks – are beginning to gain traction globally. CESNET is their pioneer.
2004 The introduction of DWDM technology. With the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-SiencE) project, the European Union is supporting the creation of a widely available computing grid infrastructure for research and development in the European area. CESNET is also involved. The eduroam academic roaming infrastructure is emerging.
2005 The core of the CESNET2 network upgraded to DWDM with a transmission rate of 10 Gb/s. The European GN2 project starts, the Czech Republic is represented by CESNET. The aim of the project is to transform the GÉANT backbone network into a hybrid network supporting both IP routing and optical circuit switching.
2006 Interconnection of CESNET, AConet (Austria) and SANET (Slovakia). The first public videoconference in HD quality in the Czech Republic is realised through the CESNET network.
2007 First 4K (UHD) video transmissions in the Czech Republic. They took place between Prague, Seattle, Chicago, San Diego, Tokyo and Amsterdam.
2008  CESNET launches the CSIRT.CZ security team.
2009  The CESNET MetaCentrum is declared a national grid infrastructure.
2010 CESNET is included in the Czech Roadmap of large infrastructures for research, development and innovation. CSIRT.CZ is declared a national CSIRT team.
2011 Very precise optical time transmission between Prague and Vienna is realised by the CESNET network.
2012 Increasing the speed of key CESNET network routes to 100 Gb/s. CESNET adds data storage to its service offering.
2013 CESNET opens the FLAB forensic laboratory. It connects to the worldwide LHC Open Network Environment (LHCONE), which is primarily used for the transfer of data from experiments carried out at the LHC accelerator at CERN. CESNET participates in the creation of the bioinformatics infrastructure ELIXIR CZ.
2014 CESNET provides access to the international university roaming network eduraom at selected train stations. The merger of Dante and TERENA creates GÉANT, which further develops the European academic backbone.
2015 Experimental transmission at 400 Gb/s in the CESNET network.
2016 The CESNET network increases the connection speed to the pan-European GÉANT infrastructure to 100 Gbps.
2017 Connection of the ELI Beamlines research centre in Dolní Břežany for the implementation of demanding scientific projects.
2018 CESNET and GÉANT represent a 300 Gb/s optical channel for the research and education community.
2019  The CESNET association, Masaryk University and VŠB – Technical University Ostrava submit a joint project for the creation of e-INFRA CZ, a modernised national large research e-infrastructure including the existing e-infrastructures CESNET, IT4Innovations and CERIT-SC.
2020 Start of e-INFRA CZ. Members of the e-INFRA CZ and ELIXIR CZ research infrastructures, the CESNET association and the CERIT-SC Centre of Masaryk University are helping to accelerate the mapping of collective immunity to COVID-19. CESNET is dramatically increasing the capacity of videoconferencing systems and helping universities manage lectures during lockdown.
2021 Implementation of the first inter-city quantum key transfer (QKD) in the Czech Republic through e-INFRA CZ.
2022 The upgraded backbone network is named CESNET3. Expansion of data storage capacity to 103 PB of gross capacity. CESNET wins the Czech Head Award in the Industrie category for its MVTP technology for low bandwidth video transmissions.
2023 Completion of a major network upgrade that will enable data transmission in the backbone network at speeds of up to 400 Gbit/s per channel with the possibility of future upgrades to terabit speeds.

 

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30 years of CESNET