Iran National Research and Education Network (SHOA, in Persian) won on Wednesday an important prize as an E-Science project at the World Summit On the Information Society in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Iranian education operator was the only Iranian nominee that made it to the second round of the contest to compete with 90 other projects from around the world.
SHOA was awarded the prize in the E-Science category for providing information and communication infrastructure that gives acces to information and knowledge and capacitates Iranian researchers, according to the World Summit On the Information Society (WSIS) website.
The first operator of communication, telecommunication and value-added content in Iran, as SHOA describes itself, provides access to quality education, paves the way for gender equality, is a decent work that leads to economic growth and can reduce inequalities, according to the summit jury.
“SHOA is one of the components of the Science economy ecosystem,” reads a statement by the WSIS that goes on to say that “SHOA has contributed to the development of E-Science in Iran, as well as the capacity building of science development in the country, and has provided high-speed access for all universities and research centers and students. and it will boost the economy in Iran”.
SHOA is a Public–Private Partnership (P.P.P.) project between the Iranian private sector, government and the academia.
It is also known as the Iranian National Research and Education Network (NREN), a specialised internet service provider dedicated to supporting the needs of the research and education communities within a country, reads the project’s website.
It is usually distinguished by support for a high-speed backbone network, often offering dedicated channels for individual research projects.
NRENs are usually the places where new Internet protocols and architectures are introduced before deployment within the Public Internet. Two examples of these protocols are IPv6 and IP multicast. Two examples of architecture are client/server and Cloud computing.