| Feature / Service | Standard Commercial ISP/ Public Solutions | BERNET |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual Classrooms & Videoconferencing | ❌ Commercial Apps (Zoom/Teams): High per-seat licensing costs, strict time limits on free tiers, and data is routed globally, draining expensive international bandwidth. | Classroom Videoconferencing (BigBlueButton): Purpose-built for academia, 100% integrated into your Moodle LMS. Hosted locally on BERNET servers with unmetered session limits and zero-rated local traffic. |
| Global Campus Roaming | ❌ None (Requires tedious local guest Wi-Fi registration at every new campus). | 🌐 eduroam: Instant, seamless, and secure global Wi-Fi roaming using your home university credentials at thousands of locations. |
| Single Sign-On Federation | ❌ None (Requires manual account creation and separate passwords for every application). | 🔑 eduGAIN / Trust & Identity: One single secure login granting your students and staff access to thousands of global educational resources. |
| Massive File Sharing | ❌ Heavily limited by public cloud quotas or expensive commercial storage subscriptions. | 📂 FileSender Collaborative: Safely transfer massive 100GB+ research datasets and academic multimedia without commercial limits or data quotas. |
| Open-Access Repositories | ❌ Completely unsupported (Data is lost or scattered across random personal drives). | 🏛️ DSpace Digital Repository: Centrally archives, preserves, and globally indexes institutional theses, dissertations, and local research papers. |
| Advanced Compute Resources | ❌ Out of reach due to massive commercial public cloud compute costs ($$$). | ⚡ AI & HPC Services: Dedicated, high-density GPU/CPU processing pipelines for complex local scientific simulations and deep learning. |
| Traffic Routing | 🌐 Slower, congested public web channels shared with standard consumer streaming and entertainment traffic. | 🚀 Dedicated R&E Backbones: Fast, low-latency, unblocked routing connected directly to global regional networks (like UbuntuNet Alliance). |
Steering BERNET’s strategic vision to integrate Burundi’s higher education institutions into the global research grid.
Architecting and optimizing the high-performance core infrastructure that anchors our national academic backbone.
Safeguarding institutional data assets, managing trust federations, and defending our research network from digital threats.
Managing sustainable institutional resource allocation and financial frameworks to support national network expansion.