Results Of The GÉANT Project
GÉANT has already created the most advanced international networking infrastructure in the world. GÉANT is the sixth generation of pan-European research network and connects European countries at backbone speeds of up to 10Gbps. It continues to follow the trend of each successive generation of network exceeding the capacity and geographic coverage of its predecessor.
GÉANT also provides and maintains a stable and dependable set of services on which a large and diverse end-user community can rely. The service portfolio offered by the network has been expanded from a basic IP service to encompass a predictable Quality of Service offering. This itself currently comprises three services provided on GÉANT:
- Premium IP
- Best Effort
- Less than Best Effort.
In addition, IPv4 Multicast has also been implemented on GEANT - as have IPv6 services. A major milestone was achieved in April 2003 when the first set of NRENs was connected to GÉANT on native IPv6 accesses. As a result, the majority of IPv6-enabled European NRENs are now able to connect to the network, which offers a dual-stack core IPv6 backbone. The deployment of this next-generation IPv6 Internet Protocol service represents a major development in the services provided to Europe’s NRENs.
GÉANT continues to expand during its operational life, both in terms of the number of countries it connects and the capacity of its backbone and access links. In addition to connecting the existing 25 European Union member states (including the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004), GÉANT provides services to the candidate countries that are expected to join the EU in future, and also to Iceland, Israel, Norway and Russia. In total, the GÉANT backbone interconnects more than 3,500 research and education institutions in 33 countries through 29 national and regional research and education networks.
