The Prague lecture by Vint Cerf was watched on the Internet by two thousand people, dozens of them through the IPv6 protocol

The Internet broadcast of a lecture by one of the pioneers of the Internet, Vint Cerf, which took place last Thursday in Prague at the Electrotechnical Faculty of the Czech Technical University (FEL ÈVUT), was watched by almost two thousand users. Of these, several dozen people watched the lecture over an Internet protocol of the new generation IPv6. This was made possible by the technological arrangement of the transmission, realised by the CESNET association and FEL ÈVUT within the framework of the national research and education network, CESNET2. At the peak all the unicast transmissions (Windows Media and Real Video) were watched by around 750 users producing the global bandwidth of more than 420 Mbps to the Internet.

The Internet protocol IPv6 is gradually replacing the existing protocol IPv4, which is ceasing to be adequate for the needs of the global Internet community mainly due to the number of available IP addresses and the weaker security of the data transmitted. IPv6 should remove these shortcomings or at least eliminate them considerably. Attention was also drawn to the limitations of the IPv4 protocol during the Prague lecture by Vint Cerf, who at the beginning of the 1960s was one of the leading figures of the team that developed the contemporary Internet protocol. This forms the technological basis of the Internet network because it determines the format and the manner in which data travel through the computer network.

The CESNET association participated actively on an international scale in the development and introduction of the IPv6 protocol, which is offered today to participants in the CESNET2 network as a regular service.

The CESNET Association was established by the universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. At present it is financed first and foremost from the means of the government Council for Research and Development and from the means of its members. The Association deals with the research and development of information and communication technologies and builds and develops the national gigabit optical network CESNET2, intended for research and education. Thanks to the research activities and results achieved the CESNET Association represents the Czech Republic in the project of the construction of the Pan-European network GÉANT2 and in other international projects.