Nokia and partner Q13 will deploy a 4.8 Tbps IP backbone across more than 350 routers to modernise Rede Ipê, Brazil's national research and education network, in a contract with operator RNP announced this week.

Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP), the largest National Research and Education Network (NREN) in Latin America, selected Nokia to supply core, aggregation, peering and universal provider edge capabilities from a single product line. Q13, a Brazilian technology and digital transformation specialist, will lead network implementation and migration services.

What will the upgraded network deliver?

The architecture delivers 4.8 Tbps of aggregate capacity across more than 350 routers, creating an IP backbone Nokia describes as ready to evolve to 800G per interface. Nokia will deploy its 7750 Service Router and 7250 Interconnect Router platforms across the network, which connects more than four million users at Brazilian research and education institutions.

RNP also links to more than 125 academic networks across over 100 countries in the Americas, Europe and Africa, anchoring Brazil's participation in global scientific collaboration. The modernisation consolidates RNP's routing stack onto a single supplier for the first time, replacing what the operator characterised as fragmented multi-vendor equipment across network tiers.

Why did RNP pick a single-vendor approach?

Ari Frazão, Adjunct Director of Engineering and Operations at RNP, tied the decision to rising demand for AI-driven research and the operational strain of running a multi-vendor backbone.

"As demand for AI and advanced research grows, Brazil's research and education communities need a network that can scale with those requirements while connecting people, institutions and ideas across the country," Frazão said.

He added: "This modernisation will help expand access to knowledge and provide a stronger digital foundation for Brazil's future. For the first time, RNP will have core, aggregation, peering and edge equipment from a single technology provider, enabling us to invest significantly in network automation."

The single-supplier model lets RNP standardise software, automate routing operations and reduce the integration overhead of running separate vendor stacks at each tier. Nokia said the architecture targets four workload categories driving traffic growth at the NREN:

• Data centre connectivity for university and research campuses
• Large-scale scientific collaboration across institutions
• Private wireless networks for laboratories and field sites
• AI-enabled applications and machine-learning data exchange

What research areas will benefit?

RNP expects the upgrade to support research in health, climate science, biodiversity and engineering, all of which increasingly depend on petabyte-scale data sets, federated learning and real-time instrument connectivity. The Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation funds RNP through the Brazilian government, and the network carries traffic for federal universities, research institutes and selected industry partners.

The modernisation also addresses growing pressure on Brazilian institutions to host AI training workloads locally rather than transit data to overseas clouds. A 4.8 Tbps backbone with 800G-ready ports positions Rede Ipê to absorb those projects as new compute infrastructure comes online.

What comes next?

Neither Nokia, Q13 nor RNP disclosed contract value or a specific completion date. Migration will roll out in phases under Q13's lead, with Nokia supplying platforms and integration support. Nokia framed the architecture as ready to scale to 800G as research traffic expands, though RNP has not committed publicly to a 400G or 800G upgrade window.