The Pan-European Research and Education Network GÉANT interconnects Europe’s National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). Together we connect over 50 million users at 10,000 institutions across Europe.


>=1Gbps and <10Gbps 10Gbps 20Gbps 30Gbps >=100Gbps


HPC 2014-15 | International cooperation


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GÉANT connectivity as at January 2014. GÉANT is operated by DANTE on behalf of Europe’s NRENs. Géant connects more than 50 million users across 10,000 institutions in Europe


showed, for the first time, that a single photonic integrated circuit can enable more than a terabit of super-channel coherent capacity from a single line-card with a single fibre connector. Terabit networking is not only a


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significant achievement in its own right, but it demonstrates the way in which Dante is more than just a service provider. Research is also part of its brief. It is one of the strengths of the organisation, according to Dr John Chevers, chief business development officer for Dante, that people working on the research side can have their work informed by the needs and characteristics of the infrastructure provision as well. Over the years, Dante’s work programme


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a longer timescale in the past, opening up the opportunity to plan on a more ambitious scale for the network. It is hoped that next April, in conjunction with the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research programme, a seven- year initiative will be possible, so that the organisation will enter ‘an exciting new phase’. Te ‘Europe’ that Dante serves is much


GÉANT is co-funded by the European Union within its 7th R&D Framework Programme.


has been organised as consecutive ‘projects’, with what is now the fourth consecutive Géant project drawing to its close. Chevers hopes that, in future, Dante will be able to plan its work on


bigger than the EU, however – stretching from Israel to Norway. Tis presents challenges of geography and national sensibilities. Some countries already have a lot of fibre in the ground, whereas others have less capacity in their fibre network. Yet Dante has been successful, Chevers said, because it understands the research and education sectors and tailors its services to their needs. ‘We are providing scale and quality and global reach that is not available commercially,’ he said. Apart from its flexible governance structure


as a limited company rather than an unwieldy intergovernmental organisation, another key to success is its financial policy. It is funded in part by the European Commission, as part of its ‘European Research Area’ policy, and also by subscriptions from the national research and education networks (NRENs). But NRENs are not charged in the way that a commercial service provider would structure the fees, Chevers explained. Tey do not pay for the volumes of the traffic that they send down the fibres but rather for the available capacity. Tis reflects the fact that scientific usage of a communications network differs from the commercial. Scientific data flows tend to be ‘bursty’ – there is much higher peak utilisation, compared to the average, than for commercial networks. A commercial provider would want to sell every last Mbit on the link, whereas Dante has to install capacity that


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