China Education and Research Network-CERNET was built in 1994. It was supported and constructed by Chinese government. Tsinghua University and other top universities are responsible for the construction and operation of the CERNET backbone. CERNET is the first national Internet backbone using TCP/IP in China. It is also an important infrastructure of educational informatization in China and an integral part of national informatization infrastructure. After more than 25 years of development, CERNET has become a large scale academic network. CERNET connects more than 2000 organizations, with more than 20 million users, and supporting wide range of major national education and research applications.
CERNET2 is a high-performance 100G pure IPv6 architecture with more than 10 million IPv6 users. As for 2021, The 3rd generation of CERNET, Future Internet Technology Infrastructure (FITI), has come into operation, FITI is now under construction and operation by 40 universities in China.