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The Thrust to connect the NRENs of Africa to Géant:

It is urgent and vital for the UbuntuNet Alliance to start offering attractive and useful services to

participating NRENs.  Because of the wonderful vision and commitment of the European

Commission in building the Géant network and in establishing high-speed inter-continental links

between the Géant network in Europe and RENs all over the World, Géant is the de facto central

hub of the inter-connected RENs of the World. Consequently a great start would be to provide

connectivity to Géant and hence to other RENs of the World.

For this reason the Alliance has launched its "Thrust to connect to Géant". This will be

relatively short-lived, and will establish connectivity to Géant using existing service contracts and

infrastructures, including both terrestrial and satellite-based infrastructures, as a service that the

Alliance can offer almost immediately to participating RENs. This thrust focuses on IP routing

arrangements, and establishes institutions' connectivity to UbuntuNet and via UbuntuNet to

Géant without waiting for broadband transport infrastructures to become affordable or available.

The bandwidth of the connectivity is determined by the institutions' and NRENs' existing

infrastructure, and, in many cases, would not be at broadband speeds.

The Géant Policy Committee has already approved in principle the Alliance's request to connect

to Géant. The Alliance will establish a single connection to Géant from an UbuntuNet Hub that

the Alliance will establish and operate at or near Géant's PoP in London. The NRENs will

connect to the UbuntuNet Hub either directly or using GRE tunnels through the networks of the

NRENs' current Internet service providers. South Africa's TENET has enjoyed such a tunneled

connection to Géant since October 2004, and reports that it has been extremely stable. For many

NRENs, the long-haul connectivity from Africa involves transmission segments via satellites.

The sketch below illustrates the concept. Ub-EU denotes the envisaged UbuntuNet Hub.

Géant

General

Internet

Ub-EU

The Hub will announce to Géant the prefixes learned over the tunnels from the NRENs. The AS-

paths will reflect each NREN's own AS followed by UbuntuNet's AS. Likewise, over the

tunnels, the Hub will announce to the NRENs, and only the NRENs, routes learned from Géant.

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