The National Education and Research (NERN) Broadband Backbone Network

Countries in the Mediterranean region able to benefit from the IP-based Euro-Mediterranean (EUMED-CONNECT) network project are Algeria, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Malta, Morocco, the Palestinian authority, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey. In Palestine, the project seeks to establish an academic network with a 45 Mbps bandwidth capacity which is upgradeable to 155 Mbps, in the future. Al-Quds Open University (QOU) is hosting the focus point in Palestine, coming from the United Kingdom, while Jordan hosts its focus point, with a similar bandwidth, from France. The proposed system, in this paper, fulfills the long-waited dream for the creation of a broadband, next generation, national education and research network in Palestine. It embodies the diverse engineering skills, experience and management of my engineering development team in putting it together, as a novel infrastructure of system engineering, that would respond to current and future needs of the education and research sector in our country. The system will provide a resilient high bandwidth network connectivity from the national institutions to the backbone to serve as a means of collaboration between institutions to share academic programs as well as networked applications. It is a scalable, upgradeable network that is capable of carrying all kinds of voice, data and video without any type restriction, in an efficient, secure and economic manner.