Advanced networks allow scientists, researchers, academics, professors and students to collaborate by sharing information and tools through a series of network interconnections. These networks represent an area that is different from commercial (or public) internet; an area that exists in a dedicated parallel space across the globe exclusively for research and education communities; this is what we call advanced networks. Latin America’s advanced network is RedCLARA, which interconnects the national academic networks from Latin American countries, and every continent and/or subcontinent in the globe has its own regional network. All these networks are in turn interconnected to each other.

By making use of advanced networks, academics and researchers can collaborate across different countries and continents, regardless of distances and borders.

Advanced networks serve two fundamental purposes:

• To support the work of researchers and academics through the provision of an large-capacity infrastructure for data communication, which enables the fast transfer of large amounts of data.
• To act as a powerful research tool, by providing a platform over which researchers and innovators can develop and test new network services and technologies.

Many of the advances in telecommunications and networks were developed thanks to advanced networks and many of the technologies that will be used in the future are currently being developed in them.

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RedCLARA is responsible for the implementation and management of the network infrastructure that interconnects the Latin American National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and, through them, a large number of universities and research centers. Thus, scientific and academic communities and many projects lacking adequate infrastructure to support its initiatives today advance and collaborate with each other, contributing to the development of science, education, research and innovation in Latin America.

The RedCLARA backbone consists of five leading routing nodes, connected in a point-to-point topology. Each main node (IP) represents a PoP (Point of Presence) for RedCLARA; four of them are located in Latin American countries: SAO (São Paulo – Brazil), Buenos Aires (BUE - Argentina), Santiago (SCL - Chile), Panamá City (PTY - Panama). The fifth is in Miami (MIA - United States).

All connections to RedCLARA of the South American national networks are through one of these nodes, which, in turn, are connected by a 100 Gbps ring between the United States, Panama, Chile and Brazil, closing in the United States. For Central American countries, RedCLARA has an infrastructure of 20 Gbps capacity that is divided among the participating countries.

To connect with the world, RedCLARA mainly uses the Miami node (MIA - United States), where it exchanges data with the networks: GÉANT (pan-European), Internet2 (United States) and CANARIE (Canada).

The southern part of the backbone connects with 10 Gbps links between Santiago (Chile) and Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Porto Alegre (Brazil).