GÉANT Keeps On Growing

Those of you familiar with GÉANT may have been expecting it to transport itself  at high speed into the annals of history in autumn 2004. So why's it still going strong?

The GÉANT network is continuing in operation and will assure a seamless, high-performance service until its successor, GÉANT2, enters operational service later in 2005. The GÉANT2 project began formally on 1 September 2004, but it takes time to plan and build a network as advanced and far-reaching as GÉANT2.

In the meantime, GÉANT is continuing to serve the European research and education community, and helping researchers around the world collaborate together to advance the frontiers of human knowledge. 

Until GÉANT2 enters operational service, GÉANT itself is still developing. An upgrade of the Estonian access circuit (from 155Mbps to 622Mbps) became fully operational in January 2005, and more upgrades are expected in the near future. The virtual PERT (Performance Enhancement and Response Team) is on hand to support the users of GÉANT by fine-tuning network performance and troubleshooting performance issues. There are further changes in the pipeline - watch this space for more news as 2005 progresses.