About the Greek School Network

The Greek School Network (www.sch.gr) is the national network of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs which safely interconnects 16.189 schools of Primary and Secondary education, including educational units abroad, services and entities supervised by the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs at central and regional level. The GSN provides services to 1.358.269  students, teaching staff, other educators and other entities of Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs (www.minedu.gov.gr).

Through GSN the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs provides the educational community with e-learning services, communication, and collaboration, e-government services as well as helpdesk and user support services. A brief description of the main services of GSN is presented in section 5.

GSN is the official and exclusive network and services provider for the units (schools/administrative units) of Public Primary and Secondary Education.

GSN also certifies all members of the school community (schools, administrative units, teachers, students, and administrative staff). The service of safe user authentication is being utilized by the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs and regulated entities for the provision of specialized electronic services.

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GSN Interconnects and supports 16.189 units of which:

• 14.443 Primary, Secondary and Post-Secondary Schools (public and private)
• 157 Primary and Secondary Education administration units
• 1.050 other units (eg libraries etc.)

The GSN  provides e-learning, communication and collaboration, e-government and user support and assistance services, with personalized access to 1.358.269 users:

• 190.335 in-service teachers
• 1.108.868 students in Primary & Secondary schools
• 4.434 administrative staff
• 54.632 retired teachers
• Administrative accounts for unit's needs: 29.058

Stats date: 2025-04-25 06:32:36

History

The first efforts to create a national network of schools started by the Ministry of Education in 1996, with actions implemented by the Computer Technology Institute as the “Pilot Schools Network of Achaia” (1996), “Odisseas” (1997), “Winds of Aeolus” (1998) of the action “Odisseia” of CTI.

The Greek School Network was formed as a single national network of schools in 2000. From the beginning of the creation of GSN, CTI undertook the strategic and technical coordination of all involved entities i.e. Universities.

The connection of schools of Secondary Education was completed in January 2011. Subsequently, priority was given to the connection of primary schools and to the assignment of personal accounts to teachers. The network grew rapidly during the period 2000-2006 with co-funded resources. In 2008 the Data Center of GSN was designed by CTI and acquired with resources from OPIS (Operational Program ‘IS’ )which gave a major push to the online services of GSN. During 2006-2009 the upgrade of the connections of more schools to broadband took place. Today broadband index reaches 98.9%. Since 2010 the upgrade of school connections with fibers began and more than 380 schools have now super high speeds which constitute an internationally high index.

The GSN as a public network is working closely and harmoniously with the other two national networks GRNET (www.grnet.gr) and SYZEFXIS (www.syzefxis.gov.gr) and plans the next day (in terms of access) which will be the transition of school’s circuits to the, under construction, Public Sector Network.

Administration

According to article 32 of Law 3966/2011, the administration and management of the GSN are exercised exclusively by CTI - Computer Technology Institute and Press "Diophantus". For this purpose, the Infrastructure and Networks Directorate of CTI "Diophantus" collaborates with specialized network teams from seven (7) Universities (AUTH, University of Athens, University of Ioannina, University of Thessaly, University of Crete, University of West Attica, International Hellenic University) and the Institute of Communications and Computer Systems of NTUA (ICCS). These entities, support the units in their region, and also, some of them develop and support dedicated web and online services of the GSN.
GSN as a public network collaborates with other two major national networks, that is GRNET (www.grnet.gr) and SYZEFXIS (http://www.syzefxis.gov.gr). GSN’s technical teams have contributed to the design of the Public Administration Network (SYZEFXIS I) and the Public Sector Network (SYZEFXIS II).

Infrastructures

Network Equipment

GSN is the largest public network in Greece in the number of users it serves. In particular, it interconnects and also connects on the Internet 16.189  schools, a community of 1.108.868 students and 190.335 teachers. GSN applies modern web technologies and is one of the first five school networks in the world that adopted IPv6 protocol.

GSN owns 118 nodes in all country capitals and in the largest Greek cities. The number of nodes is expected to reach 120 by the integration of the interconnection of GSN with the Metropolitan Optical Fiber Networks of Municipalities. The technical team of CTI that is responsible for the proper functioning of the backbone network manages more than 200 network devices daily. The average network traffic of GSN to the Internet is more than 9 Gbps daily.

Recently, GSN upgraded its network infrastructures of the school complex of Grava (the largest in Greece), using the most modern optical and wireless technologies to serve more than 3.500 users.

Main data center Equipment

The computing infrastructure of GSN is equally stronger. Through this infrastructure, GSN provides its services to more than 1.358.269 members (schools, administrative units, teachers, students, etc.)

The main data center of GSN is located in Athens. Three other (of smaller capacity) data centers are located in Thessaloniki (one) and in Patras (two).

The technical team of CTI that is responsible for the uninterruptible operation of data centers manages daily more than 100 servers and network devices.

Main Services

GSN offers its members a wide range of electronic and web services for certification, secure access, information, communication, collaboration, multimedia, e-learning and e-gov. GSN utilizes various IT systems and internal procedures in order to efficiently monitor and supervise the aforementioned e-services, thus establishing a secure operational environment.

A brief list of the main services provided, is shown below.

Broadband Connection

Portal

The portal of GSN https://www.sch.gr operates as an informational point for actions related to education and as a central point of access to GSN services. The main features of the portal are:

• News, announcements, and events related to the educational community
• Instructions and manuals for services provided by the GSNP
• Personal websites of the members of GSN and other educational websites
• Access to the personal admin panel for each member of GSN
• Connection with other services of GSN

Visitor statistics: >150.000 unique visitors/month (2024)

Honors

GSN has received the following honors:

• During the difficult circumstances of the suspension of school operations due to the covid-19 pandemic, the GSN successfully implemented the transfer of all educational activity of all schools from physical classrooms to digital classrooms. This success was recognized by the study “Just How Resilient are OECD and EU Countries Sustainable Governance in the Context of the COVID-19 Crisis” (10.12.2021) by the independent foundation Bertelsmann Stiftung. According to this, Greece rose to 7th place among OECD and European Union member countries from 22nd place before the pandemic and is considered one of the successful states in managing the pandemic in the education system
• Greek school network increasingly turning to open source (2014) https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/greek-school-network-increasingly-turning-open-source 
• Greek school network adopt IPv6 (2007) http://cordis.europa.eu/result/brief/rcn/3467_en.html
• Networking students and teachers in Greece (2004) http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/esf/docs/el2_1_en.pdf