Data traffic across Janet hit a new peak this month when numbers reached over 100Gbit/s – this is the equivalent of uploading 10000 YouTube videos!

Seasonal fluctuations mean that high traffic volume is expected during this time of year, but this is the first instance in Janet’s history that numbers have hit 100Gbit/s.

Our research shows that traffic over the network is doubling every 18 months, with our customers predicting their use of the network will grow significantly over the next few years.  This increase can be attributed to a number of growing trends, which include the rise in students’ access to bandwidth hungry content -such as music and videos, and the growing tendancy to outsource business activities, such as web mail, to the cloud and external data centres.

This growth also correlates with a number of large content providers upgrading their Janet peering connections by 50% over the past couple of years to address customer demand.

Feedback from a recent requirements gathering exercise indicates that both research and education will continue to rely more heavily on network resources to conduct their business.  An increase in collaborative activities, the use of media rich applications as well as the huge amounts of data used across research disciplines means there will be increasing demands on the network in terms of performance and capacity.  We have recently begun a range of activities to plan the next generation of the Janet network and will ensure that we continue to support our customers’ needs.

“The network Janet is an essential part of Education and Research. It is vital that the network continues to evolve to track the needs of the community and provide sufficient capacity to meet the demands of its 18 Million users,” says John Seymour, Head of Network Operations.