The Brazilian National Research and Educational Network (RNP) and the Ministry of Planning, Development and Management (MP) today signed a technical cooperation agreement that provides for the traffic exchange of Voice over IP (VoIP) between the two institutions. Thus, the MP network, named Infovia VoIP, is benefited from being able to make internet calls for the network of fone@RNP, which interconnects more than 280 points, between public universities, federal institutions and research centers as, for instance, Embrapa and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz, in Portuguese) and vice versa.

According to the secretary of Information Technology of MP, Marcelo Pagotti, “this is an important step for Infovia, the first of several agreements yet to come”. RNP's director general - Nelson Simões - pointed out that “the agreement has great value, since it will increase the benefit of fone@RNP, as it is connected to Infovia VoIP”, facilitating the access of the organization's customer institutions to MP and other ministries using infovia.

Simões also emphasized that “we expect in 2016 that fone@RNP provides savings of around 3 million Reais”. That is, this is the amount that the customer's institutions of the service will save with minutes in the commercial telephony.

In the future, RNP and MP also discuss partnerships in cloud computing, security and interoperability standards in Electronic Government.