ERNET

Beginning

ERNET was initiated in 1986 by the Department of Electronics (DoE), with funding support from the Government of India and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), involving eight premier institutions as participating agencies— NCST (National Centre for Software Technology) [Now CDAC] Bombay, IISc (Indian Institute of Science) Bangalore, five IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) at Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Madras, and the DoE, New Delhi. ERNET began as a multi protocol network with both the TCP/IP and the OSI-IP protocol stacks running over the leased-line portion of the backbone. Since 1995, however, almost all traffic is carried over TCP/IP.

History of ERNET

• ERNET started with Dial-up network in 1986–87.
• Initially UUCP mail was only service started by ERNET.
• First leased line of 9.6 kbit/s was installed in Jan’1991 between Delhi and Mumbai.
• ERNET was allotted Class B IP address 144.16.0.0 by InterNIC in 1990. Subsequently, Class C addresses were allotted to ERNET by APNIC.
• All IITs, IISc Bangalore, DOE Delhi and NCST Mumbai were connected by 9.6 kbit/s leased line by 1992.
• In 1992, 64 kbit/s Internet gateway link was commissioned from NCST Mumbai to UUNet in Virginia near Washington DC.
• In 1998 ERNET India was registered as Autonomous Society.
• In 1999-2000 new terrestrial high speed backbone was set up.
• In 2000 POP infrastructure was upgraded.
• Satellite WAN was set up in 1993.
• Today, 1100 institutes are ERNET users under different schemes.

ERNET backbone

ERNET backbone is a sophisticated link of terrestrial and satellite-based wide area networks. The satellite WAN, using VSAT technology. The VSAT network acts as an overlay for the terrestrial WAN by providing backup links between the backbone sites. International connectivity is achieved through gateways at New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata, with a total capacity of 6.64 Mb. Daily traffic over ERNET exceeds 200 GB. ERNET architecture is based on industry standard TCP/IP protocol. This network had undergone a major upgrade during year 2000–2001 in association with CMC Ltd. (A Govt. of India Undertaking, then).

ERNET backbone is being enabled to support IPv6.

ERNET international gateway and PoP sites

The ERNET is supported by the following backbone sites which enable organizations located at different geographical locations to access various services.

• ERNET Headquarters, New Delhi
• Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Mumbai
• Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
• Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
• Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
• Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune
• Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata
• Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
• Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee
• University of Hyderabad
• Center for Advanced Technology, Indore
• Odisha Computer Application Centre, Bhubaneswar
• Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Thiruvananthapuram
• National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology, Gorakhpur
• Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati
• ERNET VSAT HUB, Bangalore
• Tezpur University, Tezpur
• APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University, Thiruvananthapuram