The German Minister was accompanied by Robert Verrue, Director General of DG XIII, when she visited the TEN-155 stand during the exhibition in Essen. Mrs Bulmahn and Mr Verrue participated in a live video-session between the partners of the MECCANO Project. The MECCANO Project is the first user of the TEN-155 Managed Bandwidth Service. For the first time a group of European researchers benefited from dedicated bandwidth made available in the TEN-155 network. Frau Bulmahn said: "Offering guaranteed bandwidths, TEN-155 constitutes an example of an innovative step which prepares the ground for new applications, above all new real-time applications." Speech by the German Minister
TEN-155 became operational on 11 December 1998. The network supplies access capacities of up to 155 Mbps to 17 European university networks which makes TEN-155 the largest operational pan-European network. More and more cooperative development activities in Europe are based on the use of multi-media services, which are only effective if they can rely on high Quality of Service which cannot necessarily be provided in a "best effort" IP network. The TEN-155 Managed Bandwidth Service addresses this issue by allowing the definition of Virtual Private Networks with committed bandwidth between national university networks.
The MECCANO Project is the first user of the TEN-155 Managed Bandwidth Service. MECCANO uses the Managed Bandwidth Service to create a Virtual Private Network between three project sites across Europe. The objective of the MECCANO project is to support collaborative research and technical development through the deployment of enhanced tools for multimedia collaboration in Europe.
The TEN-155 Network is planned, built and managed by DANTE, the company organising advanced network services for the European research community.
For
more information on MECCANO, please contact:
Professor Peter T Kirstein
Project Director, MECCANO
Computer Science
University College London
Gower Street, LONDON WC1E 6BT
Phone: +44 171 380 7286
Fax: +44 171 387 1397
Email: P.Kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Press Releases
[1 March 1999]