User awareness is key to take full advantage of the new possibilities opened by BELLA-T. During the course of the project, BELLA-T will organise 3 user-centered workshops where the focus will be on the application side. The first one will be carried out within the context of the TICAL2017 Conference: The Latinamerican e-Science Meeting.

Speakers in these workshops will be researchers and PHD students who will show how the network can be used to advance research and education in their discipline, in order to emphasize the network benefits for the end users and boost user engagement.

The best use cases gathered through the Application Workshops will be fully documented and disseminated widely.

Benefits for students and researchers

• Wider scope for highly effective collaborations thanks to a 20-fold increase of current capacity between GÉANT and RedCLARA.
• Free and easy capacity upgrade over time to match evolving needs.
• Advanced collaborative services (telemedicine, cloud computing, eduroam, e-learning, etc.)
• Quicker data transmission thanks to reduced latency.
• Higher security due to direct routing between regions.

Benefits for NREN partners

• EU funding support for network improvements.
• Better connectivity provided at most competitive rates.
• Human capacity building in the form of engineering training.

Benefits for Latin America and Europe

• Supports applications with high societal impact (biodiversity, climate change, earth observation; e.g. Copernicus).
• Bridges the digital divide and fights brain drain.
• Supports competitive markets through a more inclusive information society.
• Creates more opportunities for social cohesion and development.
• Accelerates global science and education output.

• To obtain Indefeasible Right of Use (IRU) of 40 optical channels on a direct submarine cable between Europe and Brazil.
• To deploy two upgradeable 100Gbps links for:
  
  • GÉANT-RedCLARA interconnection;
  • Copernicustraffic.
• To complete RedCLARA dark fibre network and deploy a 100Gbps upgradeable network from Brazil to Colombia.

The engineering and operations of the national networks as well as the new super-powered RedCLARA’s optical backbone developed by BELLA-T will require new capacities among the networking community. Extensive engineering and technical training will be provided through face-to-face workshops as well as via on-demand resources and tutorials.

The training will cover the following subjects:

• Optical Networks’ Design
• Optical Networks Management
• Layer 2 Networking
• Advanced IP Routing
• Network Security

This training programme will be open to all network engineers from RedCLARA partner NRENs as well as interested engineers and technicians attending the TICAL meetings organised yearly by RedCLARA.