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Cabinet nods to set-up National Knowledge Network

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW DELHI, INDIA: Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure has approved the establishment of the National Knowledge Network (NKN) at an outlay of Rs.5990 crore to be implemented by NIC over a period of 10 years.

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The Government’s decision to set-up such a NKN was announced by the Finance Minister in the Budget speech of 2008-09.

An initial amount of Rs.100 crore for FY 2008-09 was allocated to the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and IT for establishing the National Knowledge Network.

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NKC will inter-connect all knowledge institutions through high speed data communication network.

A high-level committee was set-up under the Chairmanship of R Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, to coordinate and monitor the establishment of the NKN.

The architecture of the National Knowledge Network will be scalable and the network will consist of an ultra-high speed core (multiples of 10 Gbps and upwards).

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The participating institutions can connect to the NKN at speeds of 1 Gbps or to the distribution layer through a last mile connectivity bandwidth.

The NKN will have about 25 core point-of-presence (PoPs) and 600 secondary PoPs. It will connect around 1500 institutions. The Physical Infrastructure (setting up of core network) is expected to be completed in a span of 24 months.

Health, education, grid computing, agriculture and e-Governance are the main applications identified for implementation and delivery on NKN.

In the initial phase, a core Backbone consisting of 15 PoPs have been established with 2.5 Gbps capacity. Around 40 institutions of higher learning and advanced research have already been connected to the network and six virtual classrooms set-up.

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