The Polytechnic of Viseu is one of the first three entities to have its 100 Gbps* RCTS connection activated, as part of the RCTS 100 project. The President of this higher education institution, José dos Santos Costa, highlights the impact of this upgrade, also emphasizing the role of FCCN services in the day-to-day life of the academic community.
What is the significance and impact of the activation of the Viseu Polytechnic's connection to the national 100 Gbps education and research network?
Over the past few years, Viseu Polytechnic has increased the offer of digital services to its users. The offer of services and the ease of access has led to a significant increase in the number of devices connected simultaneously (cell phones, tablets, laptops, IoT, etc.) to our digital services, as well as a strong increase in the consumption of multimedia services.
The connection of Viseu Polytechnic to the national teaching and research network at 100Gpbs is extremely relevant to meet the throughput needs of the various users, now allowing to provide a service with greater bandwidth and supporting more users simultaneously with high quality service.
In terms of technological infrastructure, this upgrade allowed the opening to new perspectives of access to cloud services (such as Software as a Service), redundancy and fault tolerance services, computing, among others, as well as the transmission of events held at the IPV to the public through video streams.
At the academic level, it also allowed a significant improvement in what concerns the support to teaching activities, opening the possibility of using emerging technologies, such as virtual labs, immersive environments, virtual reality or learning analysis of the data that comes from the use of online e-learning platforms and attached services (zoom). In this context, it contributed to the dynamic adjustment of contents and/or students' academic paths, fostering their success and commitment in these new paradigms of teaching, always in a perspective of continuous improvement of the digital services of the IPV.
As far as research and development are concerned, it provides faster access to national and/or international scientific conferences in a hybrid model (face-to-face and online) and access to massive online databases, namely academic and scientific publications, among others.
What importance and impact do the digital services and projects of the FCCN Unit have on the day-to-day life of the Polytechnic of Viseu community?
The digital services and projects provided by FCCN to our community are already fundamental to the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, so it's difficult to single out just a few. In terms of visibility and impact, eduroam can be highlighted as it allows our community to have connectivity anywhere that eduroam is available, as well as ensuring this same connectivity, automatically, to everyone who visits us.
It is also worth mentioning the Colibri service, on which we depended so much when the confinements started and which is here to stay, as it has already become a fundamental tool in the Institute's daily life. Also the B-on is already a service universally used by the IPV community, allowing a simpler and more convenient access to all the available repositories.
Without being exhaustive, examples of services used by our community are Filesender, RCTS-CERT, RCTS-Certificados Digitais, RCTSaai, RCAAP, PTCRIS, CIÊNCIAVITAE and CIÊNCIAID, Videocast, Educast, Nau and Arquivo.pt.
Already having more bandwidth for outside access, the use of new services, in particular cloud services, will also be explored.
In short, because I must mention it and emphasize it as President of the Institution, the services provided by FCCN are already ubiquitous in the IPV and have a strong and unique impact on the daily work carried out by our entire community.
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Learn more about the RCTS100 Project - *Project co-financed by the Operational Program for Technical Assistance, Portugal 2020 and the European Union, through the European Regional Development Fund.
