JISC

One of JISCs’ main responsibilities is to fund and provide a UK-wide education and research network that is secure, innovative and capable of delivering world-class services both now and in the future.

Last November saw the launch of the new network backbone SuperJANET5. Central to JISC’s strategy and key to UK education and research’s engagement with ICT, this latest version of the world-class JANET network provides previously unsurpassed levels of reliability and scalability.

Delivering dedicated bandwidth on demand to serve UK education and research, the new network represents state of the art technology and while at launch it boasted speeds of 10 Gbs, it is already proving capable of operating at 40Gbit/s, Europe’s first National Research and Education Network (NREN) to deliver at this speed.

In March 2007 the announcement was made that full transition to SuperJANET5 was complete, both on time and on budget. Figures compiled by the pan-European networking association TERENA show that the cost per institutional connection to JANET is not only lower than that for the major European NRENs but is well below the average.

Making the most of one of the fastest, most secure and most resilient academic networks in the world is key to institutional effectiveness and the provision of high-quality and user-focussed network services is therefore also central to JISC’s strategic aims.

A Value for Money report published during the last year highlighted the national provision of value-added services by JANET(UK) provided significant savings to UK education and research. It was found, for example:

• JANET Web Hosting Service offers 5 times the capacity than do commercial offerings for a similar cost
• JANET-CERT service – which raises awareness about the security threats to the network – similar commercial services would cost the community at least three times more than the current cost of the service

Such figures are replicated across other network services, of which there are over 20, and the new network allows institutions to use the primary JANET service for a wider range of activities and resources than ever before.

These include services such as:

• UK Access Management Federation providing the foundation for more secure and simplified access to e-resources of all kinds for all education sectors
• Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP - Internet telephony) in December 2006, followed by the VOIP advisory service in April 2007
• JANET Roaming (location free access) now available in over 80 institutions across the UK

April also saw the launch of JANET Wireless Technology Advisory Service. In June of this year it was announced that JANET(UK) was to be the new name for the JNT associations which deliver the network on behalf of JISC. In May a text messaging service was announced, called JANET txt allowing organisations access to a secure SMS text messaging service.  

With the future requirements of UK education and research central to the work of JISC’s Committee on Networking (JCN), plans for the successor to SuperJANET5 are already underway. The SuperJANET Development programme is researching developments in many areas including optical networking technologies and network architectures to inform the approach to future JANET network services.

See more on JISC’s networking activities