The GÉANT Project

The GÉANT project is a collaboration between 26 National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) across Europe, the European Commission, and DANTE. DANTE is the project's co-ordinating partner. The project began in November 2000 and was originally due to finish in October 2004; however, because of the project's success, and in order to permit a smooth transition to the next generation of the network (GÉANT2), the project has now been extended until 30 June 2005.

The GÉANT project’s purpose has been to improve the previous TEN-155 pan-European research network by creating a new backbone at gigabit speeds – the GÉANT network. This network became fully operational on 1 December 2001.

The project has four main objectives:

• Gigabit speeds
• Geographical expansion
• Global connectivity
• Guaranteed quality of service.

The project continues to expand the network by both increasing its transmission speeds and extending its geographic coverage. The 26 NRENs who are formal partners in the GÉANT project contract with the European Commission represent 30 countries across Europe. In addition, a further three countries (Croatia, Iceland and Turkey) are directly connected to GÉANT - a total of 33 countries.

Improving global connectivity has been a continuous effort and GÉANT now has 12Gbps connectivity to North America, and 2.5Gbps to Japan. Additional connections to GÉANT have been established to the Southern Mediterranean through the EUMEDCONNECT project. Work is also underway to establish additional connections to GÉANT for NRENs from other world regions, including Latin America (through ALICE) and the Asia-Pacific region (through TEIN2).

The project is innovative in acquiring and integrating the most advanced transmission systems and routing equipment available to create a network that remains at the forefront of research networking developments. GÉANT is committed to providing European researchers with a world-class network.

In addition to the development of the GÉANT network, the project also covers a number of other activities relating to research networking. These include network testing, development of new technologies and support for other related projects.

Since the beginning of operational service on GÉANT, a range of services has been made available on the network. The deployment of IPv6 services on GÉANT, within an ambitious timeframe, was achieved in April 2003. In addition, a number of other service developments have been initiated, to provide:

• IP Quality of Service
• IP Multicast
• Virtual Private Networks.

Network performance measurement tools and network security are the focus of significant development work.

Funding for the project is divided between the participating NRENs and the European Commission.