In order to increase the bandwidth and to achieve a more cost-effective network, in 2002 we decided on establishing a LAN-interconnect type backbone network in place of the earlier FR/ATM one. The winner of the tender MATV Rt. has built out and is operating a purely optical backbone network for the University of Szeged, whose central element located at MATV is a Catalyst-3548XL switch. At present 28 FastEthernet endpoints are attached to it. The aggregated traffic is connected to the university's central Catalyst-6509 switch through two GigaEthernet links.

At the endpoints several problems had to be solved: the reception of the full duplex 100Mbps speed from the direction of the supplier, adapting the obsolete coaxial LAN to it, and routing of several IP sub-networks at some points. These tasks were impossible to achieve with the earlier routers at the endpoints, and there were no resources to buy new routers/switches for this purpose, as a temporary solution we used PC-s running Linux.

Before the final acceptance we were running a thorough check-up to get quality parameters on the connections. For these tests we used the above PC-s with software elements developed by ourselves.