A GEANT Leap Forward In Networking For Research

An anonymous reader contributes: "A research backbone network interconnecting more than 30 countries, through which hundreds of universities can exchange traffic, with a backbone running at 10 Gbps, born on the 1st of December. Yes, it exists, and this research network is not even in the U.S.! GEANT is a european initiative which has just come online, so if you're a student in Europe, you may have noticed a significant change in your downloads speeds since last week. You can even check its weathermap! Well, obviously backbone links are still unused ... but that shouldn't last long, once people notice the sheer amount of bandwidth."

Comments

In current replies...

[jaavaaguru]

I see people saying things like:

• They're not even using 1% of capacity
• They should invest more in the last mile

I think that their idea might be to restructure the backbone services so that they are able to handle the imminent speed and reliability increases in the last mile.

In future news we'll be seeing things like:
x Telecomms corporation runs fibre in the last mile giving millions of European households the faster internet access that was made possible with the introduction of Géant's new backbone network.

I may be wrong, but that's just my $0.02

People seem to be missing ...

[Reelworld]

With all the comments about using it for faster downloads, etc, etc, people seem to be missing the fact that it'll only really speed your downloads up if you're accessing another site on GEANT. Personally when I was a student, connecting to other academic sites was never particularly slow - but JANET (the UK academic net) doesn't have particularly good peering to transatlantic links (clearly due to the cost).

What GEANT will help make more possible is inter-site co-operation, and apps like high bandwidth video streams. In response to the guy who said it was a waste of money - give it time?

Slurp!

[CoreDump]

You can even check its weathermap ! Well, obviously backbone links are still unused ... but that shouldn't last long, once people notice the sheer amount of bandwidth.

You want to see some b/w suckage? Just have all the students fire up Gnutella/Morpheus and you'll hear a really loud slurping sound. :)

Seriously though, this has ( as the US based Education networks and the like do ) the capability to further increase benefits for all of the students and researchers at the connected institutions. One of the things that Internet2 doesn't have in quite as much abundance is overwhelming raw bandwidth availability. Can't find the time to visit another school to attend a lecture? A course you want to take isn't offered at your school, but is at another one?

Realtime video and remote tele-presence applications will easily consume this bandwidth and more ( assuming they aren't drowned out by DIVX and MP3s flying around. ).

Re:Outside the US

[pubjames]

In the states? Not quite so easy... due to the simple fact of the size. Same reason we don't have GSM, same reason all these nifty technologies (anything wireless) take time.

Oh yes, that's right. Europe's easy because it's small. I'd forgotten that. Europe has a tiny land mass of 3,998,000 sq miles, whereas the USA has a massive land mass of 3,717,796 sq miles, according to Encarta. Oh, hang on, those figures can't be right, surely?

And being lots of different locally governed countries speaking different languages and (until very recently) using differnt currencies - that's got to make things easier, hasn't it!

The only reason that Europe is ahead of the USA in terms of DSL, GSM and advanced networks is because the USA, being a young country, speaking a single language with virtually a single culture and mindset and single government, well, everything is so much harder for the USA isn't it?

(Yes, this is more sarcasm)