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. 44, May-June 2001

Editor: Marine Chartois

The Projects

• GÉANT: Gigabit speeds for European research

  The implementation of the next generation of pan-European research and education network, GÉANT, is now well on track.

  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.

• SEQUIN, Quality of Service for European research

  A test tools study was carried out and the RIPE TTM boxes with GPS antenna have been chosen for delay and loss measurement. A modification of the RIPE TTM box, which is a closed box, is being undertaken in order to suit the SEQUIN monitoring requirements.
  The PSNC testbed (which will be used to investigate the interaction between high-speed and low-speed networks) and the GARR-G testbed (for tests of over-provisioned services) are ready for use and test activity will start in mid-August 2001.
  A first draft for Service Level Specification/Service Level Agreement (SLS/SLA) taking into account QoS has been produced.

  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.

• EUMEDCONNECT, research connectivity for the Mediterranean

  DANTE, in conjunction with NRENs from the Mediterranean countries, has prepared a proposal for a project called EUMEDCONNECT to enhance the research connectivity in the Mediterranean region and, potentially, to provide access to GÉANT from a further set of countries.

  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.

• 6NET, the IPv6 pilot network

  DANTE is a partner in the 6NET project proposal which provides for the establishment of an IPv6 pilot network, investigation of operational issues including the transition from IPv4 services, and demonstration of IPv6 applications. The project proposal received a positive evaluation from the EC. DANTE's principal role in the project would be to provide and manage the international connectivity needed, using GÉANT facilities as far as possible.

The Services

• TEN-155 UPGRADES

  The TEN-155 ATM STM-1 (155 Mbps) backbone capacity between Greece and the UK was doubled to 2 x STM-1 on 5 June 2001. Two other planned upgrades have been delayed: the doubling of the Austria-Germany STM-1 capacity by the addition of a POS STM-1 link is now expected to be completed by the end of July, and due to a local loop problem in Geneva, the ATM STM-1 circuit between France and Switzerland is not now expected before the beginning of August.

  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).

• DANTE WORLD SERVICE

  IUCC upgraded their US connectivity from 10 to 22 Mbps (ATM) on 22 May 2001.
  At the same time as they upgraded their connection to TEN-155, ARNES and GRNET also increased their World Service connectivity to 70 and 148 Mbps (ATM) respectively.
  HUNGARNET (Hungary) also upgraded their access to the DWS to 155 Mbps (POS) on July 2.

• GLOBAL TRANSIT

  A new POS STM-1 gateway to Infonet was added in Frankfurt am Main on 3 July 2001, bringing the aggregate capacity of the interconnection of TEN-155 with the commercial Internet to a total of 600 Mbps.

DANTE Life

• CONFERENCES AND PRESENTATIONS

  A number of presentations on GÉANT and on security issues have been given in the past couple of months by DANTE staff.

  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

• STAFF AT DANTE

  Robert Walton (UK) joined DANTE on 9 July 2001 as a Network Engineer in the Operations team. He completed his BSc in Physics at the University of Hull in July 2000. Prior to joining DANTE, Robert worked in a verification role at Nortel Networks, more specifically testing Broadband Access products that provided POTS and ADSL to the home user.

  Join us! DANTE is currently recruiting more Network Engineers. More information is available on the "Working at DANTE" pages.