JANET has delivered a technical first for UK research and education with the switch of its production traffic to 100Gbit/s. This 100Gbit/s router to router is in contrast to the more usual 100G “optical” deployment with a 10x10Gbit/s presentation at the router. Internationally other national research and education networks have conducted trials of 100Gbit/s technology but JANET is the first to run it for operational traffic.

Bandwidth demand doubles every 18 months, and the upgrade is the latest stage of the consistent evolution of the network in line with a bandwidth growth plan drawn up in 2006. It is also the best strategic and economic response to ever-increasing user need, as more and more organisations move towards cloud services and outsourcing of suppliers and as research projects generate ever-larger amounts of data.

Jeremy Sharp Head, Strategic Technologies at JANET(UK) commented: “This technical advance is the latest example of JANET(UK)’s commitment to ensuring that UK research and education is underpinned by a world class infrastructure. At a time when research and education is being asked to do more with less it is vital that we identify and implement appropriate technologies that deliver real benefits to our customers”

The use of 100Gbit/s router-to-router means that JANET can scale up the capacity of the network as it uses more advanced encoding techniques to make more efficient use of the fibre. It also allows future scaling of the network as management overhead is reduced; one 100Gbit/s link is easier to manage than ten 10Gbit/s links along the same path.

JANET(UK) will continue to work with its established industry partners: Verizon and Ciena on the transmission technology involved in the upgrade, Juniper Networks which is providing high-performance, scalable core routing capability at the heart of the JANET infrastructure with the Juniper Networks® T Series Core Router, Alcatel Lucent on the IP service that the network delivers.

“We have worked with JANET on a number of projects in the past, originally providing 10Gbit/s then 40Gbit/s capability,” said Gerard Allison, vice president UK & Ireland, Juniper Networks. “As we help them migrate to 100Gbit/s, the value of Junos® as a single, consistent operating system from platform to platform becomes clear.”