Year 2020 was marked by the exponential increase in the use of communication and collaboration services due to the need for remote access. With the video collaboration services of RNP, it was not different. Considering the growing demand because of the pandemic, RNP received funds from the Ministry of Education to expand the capacity of its services. Thus, Web Conference became a tool to support not only the performance of virtual meetings, but remote teaching as well.

In March, there were 63,000 users of the Web Conference service average monthly, with 700 simultaneous users on the tool per day. Today, the service receives about 1.3 million log-ins per month, with 16 thousand simultaneous users average per day. In September, the service reached a monthly peak of 2.5 million log-ins.

The Internet Forum in Brazil

The high number of log-ins in September was not by chance. Between September 21 and 25, the tenth edition of the Internet Forum in Brazil (FIB10) was held, which chose the Web Conference service as official platform. It was the first major challenge for RNP to hold a nationwide event 100% online for the first time.

Promoted annually by the Internet Steering Committee in Brazil (CGI.Br) since 2011, FIB10 is a preparatory activity for the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a global event promoted by the United Nations (UN). The event mobilizes the Internet Governance community in Brazil and worldwide. By means of it, CGI.br encourages representatives of the different sectors that compose it to discuss issues relevant to the consolidation and the expansion of an increasingly more diverse, universal and innovative Internet.

In 2020, the challenge was to connect more than 1 thousand participants from all over the country in a web conference, and 150 speakers in 27 workshops that compose the event program, distributed in three simultaneous rooms. There were 117 hours spent on the platform for organization, training and the event, 3.8 terabytes data traffic, 32 communities on the platform and three dedicated servers in the infrastructure of NIC.Br. 

According to the Technical Advisory manager of CGI.Br Carlos Francisco Cecconi, after the decision to make FIB10 entirely online, the criterion to choose RNP Web Conference service was to use 100% national infrastructure to transmit the information by videoconference. “We were very careful to gather all necessary knowledge on how to use the Web Conference best and we transmitted this information on to all workshop participants”, Cecconi says. 

For CGI.Br, the Web Conference stood out for its robust environment, security and availability, both in terms of software, in open code, and in terms of cloud infrastructure provided by RNP, in addition to the RNP support team available throughout the event. “We had meetings with them speaking Portuguese to try to solve a technical problem”, Carlos Cecconi commented, comparing to foreign tools.

One of the participants in FIB10, Priscila Gonsales, from Instituto Educadigital, praised the use of free software during the entire event live . "It is possible to make a robust event, using an open and free platform as Web Conference", she declared at the opening of the session about "Supervised education: students´ and teachers´ threatened data privacy and  protection".

Watch the content of the Brazil Internet Forum 2020 available on Youtube.

FIB10 and Web Conference in the three days of the event

•        117 hours used on the platform for organization, training and the event
•        3.8 TB data traffic
•        32 communities on the platform
•        Three dedicated servers in the infrastructure of NIC.Br