| Education and Research Network | |
| Type: | Government agency |
| Jurisdiction: | Government of India |
| Headquarters: | 5th Floor, Block-I, A Wing, Delhi IT Park, Shastri Park, Delhi - 110053, India[1] |
| Minister1 Name: | Ashwini Vaishnaw[2] |
| Minister1 Pfo: | Minister of Electronics and Information Technology |
| Minister2 Name: | Rajeev Chandrasekhar |
| Minister2 Pfo: | Minister of State |
| Chief1 Name: | S Krishnan |
| Chief1 Position: | Chairman (Secretary MeitY) |
| Chief2 Name: | Neena Pahuja |
| Chief2 Position: | Director General |
| Parent Department: | Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology |
| Keydocument1: | Citizen Charter |
Education and Research Network (ERNET) is an autonomous scientific society of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India. ERNET has made a significant contribution to the emergence of networking in the country. It practically brought the Internet to India and has built up national capabilities in the area of net-working, especially in protocol software engineering. It is the first internet service in india. It has not only succeeded in building a large network that provides various facilities to the intellectual segment of Indian society—the research and education community, it has over the years become a trendsetter in the field of networking.
ERNET is largest nationwide terrestrial and satellite network with point of presence located at the premiere educational and research institutions in major cities of the country. Focus of ERNET is not limited to just providing connectivity, but to meet the entire needs of the educational and research institutions by hosting and providing relevant information to their users. Research and Development and Training are integral parts of ERNET activities. The activities at ERNET India are organised around five technology focus areas:
ERNET was initiated in 1986 by the Department of Electronics (DoE), with funding support from the Government of India and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), involving eight premier institutions as participating agencies— NCST (National Centre for Software Technology) [Now [[Centre for Development of Advanced Computing|CDAC]]] Bombay, IISc (Indian Institute of Science) Bangalore, five IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) at Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Madras, and the DoE, New Delhi. ERNET began as a multi protocol network with both the TCP/IP and the OSI-IP protocol stacks running over the leased-line portion of the backbone. Since 1995, however, almost all traffic is carried over TCP/IP.[3]
ERNET backbone is a sophisticated link of terrestrial and satellite-based wide area networks. The satellite WAN, using VSAT technology. The VSAT network acts as an overlay for the terrestrial WAN by providing backup links between the backbone sites. International connectivity is achieved through gateways at New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata, with a total capacity of 6.64 Mb. Daily traffic over ERNET exceeds 200 GB. ERNET architecture is based on industry standard TCP/IP protocol. This network had undergone a major upgrade during year 2000–2001 in association with CMC Ltd. (A Govt. of India Undertaking, then).
ERNET backbone is being enabled to support IPv6.[5]
The ERNET is supported by the following backbone sites which enable organizations located at different geographical locations to access various services.