BJNet: another way to build a NREN Marc Lobelle Université catholique de Louvain Louvain School of Engineering, ICTEAM, Place Ste Barbe, 2 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium +32 474 494 616 marc.lobelle@uclouvain.be ml@uac.bj Norbert Hounkonnou Université d'Abomey-Calavi ICMPA 072 BP50 Cotonou, Benin +229 95 062 689 norbert.hounkonnou@cipma.uac.bj Firmin Donadje Forces Armées Béninoises +229 95 875 708 cofindo@gmail.com Victor Oyetola Université d'Abomey-Calavi SPTIC +229 95 568 551 victor.oyetola@uac.bj ABSTRACT This paper presents the way a gigabit NREN (National Research and Education Network) covering the whole country of Benin and that will connect over twenty university centers was built using mainly local unused infrastructures and local permanent staff already paid by the State of Benin (predominantly personnel from the Université d'Abomey-Calavi, UAC, in Benin and from Benin Armed Forces). The necessary additional equipment were provided by a relatively modest ACP (African,Caribbean and Pacific Group of States Organization) project mainly funded by the EU. The necessary expertise was mostly provided by a Belgian University, Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), a Beninese university, Université d'Abomey-Calavi (UAC), signal officers from Benin Armed Forces (FAB) and the Belgian NREN, Belnet. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.6 [internetworking] General Terms Management Keywords NREN, internetworking, network design and implementation, development, campus network, Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC), development policy. 1. INTRODUCTION Every country should have a National Research and Education Network (NREN). These networks are much more than yet another internet service provider. Beside providing access to the internet at large, they are intended to connect with a wide bandwidth all universities and research centers in the world. They enable the use of MOOCS [5],[8] at low cost to higher education students and researchers worldwide. They enable sharing huge amounts of research data such as those of the CERN. Currently, developed countries have their NRENs. The situation is different in developing and emerging countries. Lucky ones have a NREN; some have nothing and others have still just a name, sometimes with a director or a steering committee, but neither infrastructure nor service. When the first NRENs where created in developed countries, some 25 to 30 years ago, they were also just small organisations managing a few leased lines of a few tens of kbps, but they grew and are now managing, for their users, real information highways, big data centers and many services such as authentication services, eduroam, clouds, software download mirrors etc. [2][9]. They manage budgets in some cases of up to tens or even hundreds of millions of Euros a year for maintaining and developing the services and keeping up with the increasing demand [3]. Today, the needs for NRENs in developing countries are not different from those of developed countries but they cannot afford spending the same amount of money and, if they were using the same solutions, they would actually need more money because they do not just have to maintain the network and the services but they must build everything from scratch. Another approach is thus needed and has been demonstrated to be feasible by the BJNet project. Section 2 will present the context of the BJNet project. Section 3 will present the problem statement of building a NREN for Benin. Section 4 will present the BJNet strategy to solve this problem. Section 5 will discuss political issues. Section 6 will summarize and conclude 2. CONTEXT OF THE BJNet PROJECT 2.1 University networking in Benin 2004- 2010 In 2004, there were only two public universities in Benin, the Université d'Abomey-Calavi (UAC) close to Cotonou in the South and the Université de Parakou (UNIPAR), in the North. They had respectively some 30.000 and a few thousand students, but there was no campus network. On the campus of UAC there was (and there still is) the Centre Numérique Francophone de Cotonou (CNFC), financed by the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), that was connected to internet and had a LAN with a few computer rooms. There were lines linking the CNFC to the rectorate and a few faculties . In UNIPAR, only the rectorate was connected by radio to a local ISP, BorgouNet. In 2006, the Belgian Commission Universitaire pour le Développement (CUD) financed a first extended campus network for the UAC under the coordination of prof. Hounkonnou and prof. Lobelle. This project was conditioned on the UAC subscribing at own cost to an internet connection (modest: 6mbps) and recruiting on the university payroll the staff to manage and operate the network. The CUD would bring the funding and the expertise to design and build the network.