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. 40, November 2000

Editor: Marine Chartois

GÉANT NETWORK ON TRACK!

A Consortium of 30 National Research and Education Networks have signed a 80-million Euro contract with the European Commission to develop the next-generation Gigabit pan-European research network GÉANT (Press release). The network was officially launched during the IST 2000 event in Nice, France.

In parallel with negotiations with the EC which led to the signature of the GÉANT contract, DANTE acting on behalf of the GÉANT NRENs had initiated an initial procurement of the services necessary to support GÉANT. An Invitation to Tender was issued on 7 July 2000 covering the provision of high speed connectivity, housing of GÉANT PoPs, and network management services. A total of 44 tenders were received by the deadline of 29 September 2000, 30 of them making offers of connectivity. Of these 30, 16 tenders proposed connectivity at 2.5 Gbit/s between six or more countries so it seems very likely that the initial connectivity target for GÉANT will be met or even exceeded, in terms of both the geographic coverage of 2.5 Gbit/s capacity and early introduction of 10 Gbit/s connectivity in part of the network.

Full analysis of the tenders will take several months. The steps so far have included a technical evaluation of the connectivity tenders with the assistance of six engineers from the NRENs and meetings with each of the 30 connectivity tenderers in order to clarify their proposals. Contract negotiations will start shortly with the most promising of the tenderers but the final choice of contractors will not be made for another two or three months. The first of the new high speed circuits are expected to be installed in Summer 2001 to provide a reasonable overlap period before TEN-155 supply contracts end on 31 October 2001.

Once the position with respect to one or more principal suppliers of Gbit/s connectivity becomes clearer, further work will be undertaken to agree contracts for more of the pieces of a complex jigsaw: connectivity to some countries at lower capacities than 2.5 Gbit/s, provision of local loops, PoP housing, and network management.

To find more information about GÉANT and its launch, please have a look at the GÉANT webpages.

UPGRADES ON TEN-155

In August, DFN's access was upgraded to 310 Mbps and in September, the migration to the new central ring connecting the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands was completed with the rehoming of the PoPs. As a consequence, TEN-155 is now running at speeds of up to 622 Mbps.

October was a busy month upgrade-wise: NORDUnet moved to 200 Mbps on the 1st and will upgrade again to 310 Mbps once the backbone to Sweden has been upgraded and a week later, GRNET went from 34 to 155 Mbps. On the 20th, following problems with the delivery of their 155 Mbps link into France (now planned for the end of December), an interim upgrade happened for RedIRIS, giving them 124 Mbps to France and 34 to Switzerland. The end of the month and the beginning of November also saw the upgrade of POL-34 and HUNGARNET from 68 to 155 Mbps and that of SURFnet from 155 to 622 Mbps.

The Infonet interconnection of TEN-155 to the commercial Internet is also currently being upgraded from 210 to 260 Mbps.

The upgrades to Italy and Switzerland have now been delayed until early 2001, due to KNPQwest's inability to install its infrastructure in a timely manner .

NEW COUNTRY CONNECTED TO TEN-155

CARNet, the Croatian Academic and Research Network, has been connected to the TEN-155 by a 34 Mbps link to Austria on 21 November.

The official European Union research and innovations information Internet service, CORDIS, is now connected to TEN-155 through RESTENA, the Luxembourg National Research Network.

WORLD SERVICE

A new 155 Mbps line between Paris and New York became operational on October 19th and Italy also enjoys a new 622 Mbps connection to New York.

Following the recent problems with the connectivity to Abilene, it has been decided to upgrade by an extra 100 Mbps on an additional OC-3, for a total connectivity of 200 Mbps.

The connectivity to the Canadian research network CA*net has also been upgraded from 10 to 15 Mbps.

QUANTUM AND Q-MED PROJECTS: GOOD BYE...

The QUANTUM and Q-MED project, gathering 20 partners in 23 countries, were both officially terminated on 31 October 2000. TEN-155, the network born of these projects, will remain operational for another year approximately, during the transition phase with GÉANT.

SEQUIN PROJECT

The SEQUIN contract was officially signed by the EC on 31 October 2000 and the project commenced on 1 November 2000. An initial "kick-off" meeting was hosted in Zurich by SWITCH on 9/10 October to allocate tasks under the various work packages and prepare the way forward. Following that meeting DANTE NEP Manager Roberto Sabatino has produced a draft paper on SEQUIN testing on production networks and DANTE General Manager Dai Davies is preparing a QoS questionnaire/interview guide. RENATER staff member Pierre Chivalier has produced a draft on QoS Handling - Pragmatic Strategies and Deployment Issues.

A second meeting is scheduled for 5/6 December at the INFN-GARR offices in Rome at which the joining of new partners will be discussed, including Greece and, possibly, Poland. Progress on work packages 2 and 3 will also be discussed along with the next steps forward.

CONFERENCES AND EVENTS

DANTE participated in the Research Infrastructures Conference which took place in Strasbourg (France) in September.
The team supported two demonstrations presented during the conference: a Cyber-Lab session between Germany and Poland, and a demonstration of BIOIMAGE and VIDOS from the Oxford Univ. Zoology Department. Both demos went well, and their authors as well as the audience were very pleased with the results.

We also had a significant presence during the IST 2000 event (Nice, France, 6-8 November 2000), during which GÉANT was officially launched.
The DANTE engineers worked with the RENATER staff, the CRIHAN and the University of Stuttgart to set up two sets of metacomputing applications demonstrating the need for a broadband network dedicated to research, one of which was linked to the team then in Dallas for SuperComputing 2000.
It was a busy and successful event and we are delighted by the results. Many thanks to all our partners!

STAFF AT DANTE

Louise Croote (UK) left the company in the first days of September and is now working in Accounts Payable for UUNET in Cambridge, where she seems to be settling in. Krystyna Owen (UK) took over as Accounts Assistant. Prior to joining DANTE at the end of August, Krystyna had spent some 15 years doing Accounts work for various commercial enterprises.

Nicolas Simar (BE) joined DANTE as a Network Engineer in the Network Engineering and Planning team on 16 October 2000. Nicolas graduated from the University of Liege (BE) earlier this year and did his thesis in co-operation with Cisco Systems on Quality of Service.

JOIN US! DANTE is currently offering positions for Network Engineers. More information can be found on our website at http://www.dante.net/jobs/.

CORDIS: INFORMATION GATEWAY FOR THE EUROPEAN RESEARCH COMMUNITY

CORDIS, the official EU research and innovations information Internet service (http://www.cordis.lu) offers free and timely information on funding opportunities, ongoing or completed EU-funded research projects and exploitable results.

It also provides a dedicated IST web service at http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ to keep you informed of the latest developments in the Information Society Technology programme and on the projects financed within its frame.

To facilitate participation in a European research project, CORDIS has set up a tailor-made tool for the research of partners, which can be found at http://www.cordis.lu/partners-service/. Research results can be promoted on the CORDIS marketplace: http://www.cordis.lu/marketplace.

For more information, you can contact Sabine Taverne at the CORDIS information management service, tel. +32 2 238 17 99, fax. +32 2 238 17 98, email: s.taverne@cordis.lu