PASAY CITY, Philippines--The Department of Science and Technology-Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI) said the Philippines is going to be part of an Asia Pacific broadband Internet infrastructure initiative.

This was made known after the Trans-Eurasia Information Network version 3 (TEIN3) was launched during the annual Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) here on Wednesday.

The DOST-ASTI will manage the TEIN3 programs in the country and will connect to the Philippine Research Education and Government Information Network (Preginet), which is a local high-speed Internet infrastructure loop connecting dozens of research and development, medical, weather, agricultural and educational institutions.

Over 160 Philippine institutions are connected to Preginet, which allows for high performance computing and video conferencing.

TEIN3, conceived during an Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in 2000, provides high-speed connectivity among high-level research and development, and educational facilities across Asia.

The TEIN3 project will run until 2011.

It is one of the fastest Internet infrastructures built with a maximum data speed of up to 2.5 gigabits per second. A user with a 2.4 gigabytes line can download approximately 30 high-definition movies in a minute.

But the delivered connection of TEIN3 in the Philippines would only be 155 megabits per second, which is still faster than most commercial Internet services.

DOST-ASTI Director Denis Villorente said in an interview that the TEIN3 project is a continuation of the previous TEIN2 project, which ASTI was first involved in 2005.

The TEIN2 project ended in late 2008 but was immediately overlapped by the Asia-Pacific launch of TEIN3. About a dozen other countries are now part of TEIN3, including Thailand, Vietnam, Australia, Japan, Korea, among others.

Villorente said TEIN3 is expected to be implemented in several other countries, particularly Bangladesh, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Bhutan and India.

Villorente said the goal now is to encourage members and users of TEIN3 and Preginet to develop applications for their own purposes and maximize the availability of the network.

Villorente also said one of the future plans of TEIN3 is to create an Asia Pacific group to manage and sustain the TEIN project, which is currently being managed by the Deliver of Advanced Network Technology to Europe (Dante).

"It doesn't have to be a new organization. There is still discussion about that," Villorente.