JISC

UK research and education is to benefit from a network running at an unprecedented 100Gbit/s, the equivalent of uploading 125 doctoral theses in just one second*.

Internationally other national research and education networks have conducted trials of 100Gbit/s technology but JANET is the first to run it for operational traffic.

The JANET network is designed to handle vast quantities of data from the world’s greatest scientific endeavours and this latest advance ensures that the UK can collaborate and compete with the best there is.

From a primary school student learning about the Victorians through to a postgrad researching their dissertation, they all benefit from this single unifying network.

As bandwidth demand doubles every 18 months this upgrade is the latest crucial stage in the evolution of JANET.

Jeremy Sharp, head of strategic technologies at JANET, commented: “This technical advance is the latest example of JANET(UK)’s commitment to ensuring that UK research and education is underpinned by a world class infrastructure. At a time when research and education is being asked to do more with less it is vital that we identify and implement appropriate technologies that deliver real benefits to our customers.”

As more organisations move towards cloud services and shared data centres and research projects produce vast quantities of data, the move to 100Gbit/s provides a cost effective means of meeting this demand.

The international reputation of the UK’s education and research is seen as fundamental to the future economic recovery and prosperity of the country and, in a global marketplace, it can only achieve this with a world class infrastructure.

JANET’s value to the schools sector in England was recently demonstrated by the Department for Education’s decision to continue to provide central funding for the network in the forthcoming financial year.

* based on an average thesis size of 100 Mb.