A bi-monthly electronic newsletter reporting on the activities of DANTE, the company that organises pan-European research network services for the European research community.

No.39, June/July 2000

Editor: Marine Chartois

TEN-155 UPGRADE

The 622 Mbps ring due to interconnect Paris, Brussels, London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt on July 1 has still not been delivered yet, due to a variety of problems which are still being worked on by the DANTE engineers and by the KPNQwest staff.

The re-homing of three of the PoPs in Brussels, Frankfurt and London caused additional problems. The new STM4-c connections for access in Germany and the Netherlands have also proved problematic, and even impossible in the case of SURFnet, where a Giga-Ethernet alternative has been chosen; arrangements are being made to control SURFnet's traffic so that it remains within the 622 Mbps limit.

NEW COUNTRY CONNECTED TO TEN-155

A new E3 ATM link into Austria will soon be connecting Croatia to the TEN-155 network. 50% of these 34 Mbps will be dedicated to US connectivity The expected delivery date of the circuit is September 1, 2000.

QUANTUM AND Q-MED PROJECTS

The contracts with the European Commission for both the QUANTUM and the Q-MED projects have been formally extended to October 31, 2000.

GEANT

Following the submission of a proposal (with the mundane name GN1) for EC funding of the GEANT network, the proposal has been evaluated positively and DANTE and the 25 national and regional European research and education networks (NRENs) are now in the final stages of contract negotiation with the European Commission, which should lead to a financial contribution to the project of 80 million Euro over four years by the EC.

Over 90 organisations responded to a Call for Expressions of Interest, the first stage in the tendering process for the supply of service components which will be integrated to form the GEANT service. There were a few duplicates, i.e. responses from different departments of the same company, but an Invitation to Tender (ITT) was issued on July 7, 2000 to 86 potential suppliers with a deadline for responses of September 29, 2000.

The principal requirement in the ITT is for data transmission capacity at 2.5 Gbit/s between a number of European countries (the initial target is 8) with the possibility of increasing the number of countries connected at this speed and of upgrading circuits to 10 Gbit/s and then several tens of Gbit/s over a four year period. Other sections of the ITT deal with lower speed circuits, including those required to connect six countries which have no connection to TEN-155, with housing of GEANT Points of Presence and with network management services.

An information day was held in Amsterdam on July 27, 2000 to allow organisations which had received the ITT to ask questions and seek clarifications of the tender specifications. Almost all of them sent representatives to the meeting.

TEN-155 SUCCESSFULLY SUPPORTED iGRID DEMOS AT iNET 2000

DANTE provided a 2 Mbps dedicated connectivity via Abilene to STAR TAP in Chicago for one institute within RedIRIS, using the TEN-155 Managed Bandwidth Service, as well as a regular IP connectivity using the same route for DFN, both for demonstrations at the iGRID event during iNET 2000 (Yokohama, Japan, July 18-21, 2000). The demonstrations went very well and received nothing but praise.

DANTE IN PRESENTATIONS

The TF-TANT taskforce, in the person of Tiziana Ferrari, Jan Novak and Roberto Sabatino, provided the iNET 2000 (Yokohama, Japan, July 18-21, 2000) with a paper entitled "Experiences on Testing and Deploying Advanced Networking Services on TEN-155", but were unable to attend the conference to present it.

Jan Novak, from the NEP team, gave three presentations on "PIM-SM overview", "TEN-155 multicast usage and monitoring" and "interdomain multicast issues" at the LINX Multicast seminar, which took place on July 27 and 28.

Agnes Pouele, also from the NEP team, will be giving a presentation at the MPLS conference ("MPLS: Next generation networking") which will take place in London (UK) between September 25 and 28. Agnes's presentation, entitled "Examining the latest results of trials on the TF-TANT European test-bed", is scheduled for Wednesday, September 27.

Howard Davies has also been invited to give a presentation on GEANT, the next-generation Gigabit pan-European network, at NORDUnet 2000, the 19th NORDUnet conference, which will take place in Helsinki (Finland) between September 28 and 30. In addition, Howard will participate in the discussion panel in the session on "Research Network Policies" on Friday, September 29.

STAFF AT DANTE

Marian Garcia-Vidondo (ES) joined the company at the beginning of April as a Network Engineer in the Operations team. Marian graduated from the Public University of Navarra (ES) with a Master of Science in Telecommunications, before working for 4 months as a software engineer for Techne Ltd in Cambridge, UK.

Christi Scarborough (UK), DANTE's system administrator, left the company in April.