No. 44, May-June 2001
Editor: Marine Chartois
Three key contracts for the provision of connectivity for the network have been awarded to COLT Telecom, T-Systems and Telia International Carrier. The contracts were announced in a set of press releases on 5 July 2001. The process of choosing the routers is now in its final phase and contracts for connectivity to countries not covered by the three above are being finalised.
The network's initial topology is now defined. It includes eight trunks at 10 Gigabits/sec and eleven at 2.5 Gigabits/sec; eleven national research and education networks will connect to GÉANT at 2.5 Gigabits/sec from day one.
Initial work for laying out the network has already started, and GÉANT will be fully operational in November of this year.
A technical website is currently being developed and will be available shortly. It will offer access to the technical parts of certain deliverables, a list of equipment capabilities for service differentiation, information on the testbeds used in the project, as well as pointers to related subjects.
Negotiations with the European Commission with the view to including Poland and Greece as project partners are under way.
The project would be largely funded by the EC's EUMEDIS programme, which promotes the development of the Information Society in the Mediterranean region. Twelve non-EU countries are able to benefit from the EUMEDIS Programme; these are Algeria, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Malta, Morocco, the Palestinian authority, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey.
EUMEDCONNECT is being actively supported by GRNET (who hosted a recent project meeting in Athens), INFN/GARR, RedIRIS and RENATER, together with NRENs from beneficiary countries.
The European Commission are very positive about the progress being made, and plans provide for a first phase study to be carried out later this year.
A number of NRENs also have upgraded their access speeds to the network over the past couple of months: GARR (Italy) went from 155 to 200 Mbps on 1 June 2001, while GRNET (Greece) took advantage of the backbone upgrade to upgrade its access speed to TEN-155 to 155 Mbps on 5 June 2001. ARNES (Slovenia) also upgraded on 7 June 2001 from 90 to 155 Mbps.
Two upgrades are imminent, the first from 34 to 45 Mbps for IUCC (Israel) and the second from 45 to 155 Mbps for BELNET (Belgium).
Dai Davies, General Manager of DANTE, participated in a round table on Internet Settlements during the OECD Internet Workshop, which took place in Berlin on 7 and 8 June 2001.
The TERENA Networking Conference 2001 (TNC), held in Antalya (Turkey) between 14 and 17 May 2001, saw two presentations by DANTE staff: Vincent Berkhout introduced GÉANT (his presentation can be found on the GÉANT web page), and David Harmelin gave a presentation based on his work on Denial of Service attacks on transit networks.
He treated a similar subject during the FIRST Conference, which took place in Toulouse (France) between 18 and 22 June 2001. The slides for this presentation can be found at http://www.dante.net/security/dos/
Matthew Scott and Marine Chartois also gave two presentations on the GÉANT project and network, Matthew at the Warsaw ENPG meeting (29 June 2001) and Marine during the eBalkan event co-organised by the EC in Thessaloniki (Greece) on 29 and 30 June 2001. Marine's presentation is also available on the GÉANT pages at http://www.dante.net/geant/
The work carried out by the SEQUIN partners in the field of Quality of Service was also presented by Mauro Campanella, from GARR, during TNC 2001. His presentation is available on the SEQUIN web pages at http://www.dante.net/sequin/
The presentation given by Dai Davies at the Tokyo APAN meeting in February 2001 is now available online at http://www.dante.net/networks/global.html
Join us! DANTE is currently recruiting more Network Engineers. More information is available on the "Working at DANTE" pages.