CERNET is China's first and largest national academic Internet backbone, and currently the second largest network backbone in China. CERNET is supported by the Chinese government and directly managed by the Ministry of Education. Its network infrastructure mainly serves the universities, institutes, colleges and schools all over the China. The end users are professors, researchers and students.

CERNET was established in 1994. It provides services for Chinese universities, institutes, schools and other non-profit organizations in China, including network connection, .edu.cn domain name and IP address assignment, and educational and research resources and super computing services. Since 1995, CERNET organizes member meetings annually, and also organized several large international conferences and workshops to promote its knowledge and share experiences and ideas.

CERNET has a portal for Chinese educational information (http://www.edu.cn), and CERNET also sets up a large search engine for this information. For educational purposes, CERNET sets up 10 mirror systems up to 800GB for international key universities, international famous academic organizations, 12 key subjects at universities. CERNET also provides a search engine for about 1.5 million pages including Chinese and English and covering about 1 million files. CERNET also supports the digitalization of 152 libraries belonging to 152 universities.

In China, currently there are about 2,000 universities. By the end of 2005, backbone bandwidth has been up to multiple 10 Gbps and regional bandwidth up to multiple 2.5 Gbps, reached 200+ cities in 31 provinces in mainland China. CERNET also has several global connection links to North America, Europe, Asia and Pacific totally with 800 Mbps bandwidth. There are about 1,500 universities and institutions connected and about 20 million end users.

CERNET has been playing the most important role in the research of advanced network technologies and applications. As a national network platform on which many national large projects about network technologies are carried out, and it also supports many national network applications, including on-line recruiting for 1500+ universities admission, distance learning, digital library, grid, video conferencing, voice over IP, etc.. CERNET joined the large national project named China Next Generation Internet (CNGI) Project, and will undertake the largest next generation network backbone in China, named CERNET2, and operate China Next Generation Internet (CNGI) exchange point CNGI-6IX in Beijing.

update:2006-1-11