RedCLARA is a non-profit organisation, and an advanced network; it is a human network and a physical one.
Human network: RedCLARA -Cooperación Latino Americana de Redes Avanzadas (Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks)- is a non-profit International Law Organisation, whose legal existence is dated on 23 December 2003, when it was acknowledged as such by the legislation of Uruguay. RedCLARA is constituted by 13 Latin American countries and its Assembly –where each country has representation- meets every six months to define courses of action and the policies to be implemented.
Physical network: RedCLARA is the only regional Advanced Internet network in Latin America.
The backbone of RedCLARA is comprised of ten main routing nodes connected in a point-to-point topology. Each main node (IP - Internet Protocol) characterizes a PoP (Point of Presence) for RedCLARA; nine of them are located in a different Latin American country -Sao Paulo (SAO - Brazil), Buenos Aires (BUE - Argentina), Santiago (SCL - Chile), Lima (LIM - Peru), Guayaquil (GYE - Ecuador), Bogota (BOG - Colombia), Panama (PTY - Panama), San Salvador (SSV - El Salvador) and Tijuana (TIJ - Mexico)-, while the tenth is placed in Miami (MIA - United States).
All LA-NREN connections to the RedCLARA network, are ending at one of the nine Latin American nodes. Thanks to the ALICE (ended in March 2008) and ALICE2 (running from December 2008 to August 2012) projects, the RedCLARA backbone is interconnected with a multi-gigabit pan-European data communications network named GÉANT through the RedCLARA SAO PoP to the GÉANT2 entry point in Madrid (Spain - ES). RedCLARA is also connected to USA trough the links established in RedCLARA's PoP in MIA and SAO, the first one connected to the Atlantic Wave exchange point and the second to the MAN LAN in New York. Some important links have been gave to RedCLARA by RNP and WHREN-LILA. RNOP has contributed with two links of 1 Gbps between Panama and Miami, and a 10 Gbps stretch between Santiago (Chile) and Miami.
In terms of capacity, RedCLARA is developing a new infrastructure between the Latin American nodes; this infrastructure is based in IRUs (Irrestrictible Right of Use) at 10 or 15 years. Thanks to this, RedCLARA already has dark fibre in Central America going from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, a 10 Gbps backbone between Santiago (Chile) and Buenos Aires (Argentina), and a lambda of 10 Gbps between Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Porto Alegre (Brazil).
On June 10th, 2003, in Valle de Bravo, Mexico, the Memorandum of Association of the Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks, CLARA, was signed. CLARA is a non profit civil association which develops, administrates and runs a regional network of Advanced Internet called RedCLARA. With the passing of time, the name RedCLARA was used to refer both to the institution and the network; in response to this habit made popular among CLARA’s members, peer networks at a global level and researchers, since March 2011 CLARA and the network it operates are both known as RedCLARA.
