SOUTH CAUCASUS COUNTRIES ARE LINKED TO GEANT

PanARMENIAN.Net
17.03.2009 23:53 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The European Commission on Tuesday linked researchers
in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to a pan-European ultra-speed
computer network, called GEANT, Xinhua News reports.

The commission switched on a 1.75-million-euro
(2.27-million-U.S. dollar) computer network — Black Sea
Interconnection — that links researchers in the three South Caucasus
countries and connects them to GEANT, which already serves 30 million
researchers both in the European Union (EU) and some other parts of
the world.

The EU provided 1.4 million euros, or 80 percent of the funding,
said the commission.

The high-speed connections (from 34 to 100 Megabits per second)
will enable a far greater level of collaboration between researchers
and scientists in the South Caucasus region. It also promises to
impact daily life in the region by improving access to and quality of
healthcare such as allowing doctors to remotely diagnose conditions
and prescribe treatment to poor and isolated rural communities,
said the commission, the executive body of the EU.

"By investing 1.4 million euros funding in this project, we will
bridge a major digital divide by connecting scientists from the Black
Sea region to the global research community, providing high-speed
internet connections to universities and research centres in the
South Caucasus. I expect better collaboration with GEANT’s 4,000
EU research institutions will lead to better research and better
results in Europe and beyond," said Viviane Reding, EU commissioner
for information society and media.

GEANT, which also links seven Mediterranean countries, five Balkan
countries, five Central Asian countries, 14 Asian countries,12 Latin
American countries, as well as the United States and Canada, allows
researchers to communicate at a speed of 10 Gigabits per second,
said European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr.

GEANT is a 200-million-euro (260-million-dollar) project, which gets
almost half of the budget from the EU between 2004 and 2009.