Bandwidth crisis prompts massive SuperJANET upgrade

SuperJANET will see capacity jump from 155Mbps to 2.5Gbps by the beginning of March 2001 and then leap to 20Gbps by early next year. The net currently links 200 universities and over 600 further education colleges and is an important part of the internet.

Bob Day, network development director for Ukerna (UK Educational and Research Network Association), said: "The current net was essentially running out, especially in the South East and Manchester. Like everything on the internet, there has been a large growth of use - in our case it was doubling every year.

"Further education institutions, added recently, are increasing their use and we are continually moving into more use of video. That's going to become commonplace when the bandwagon takes off."

Ukerna can't comment officially, but it is likely that it will provide the backbone when UK schools get on the internet.

The new system, SuperJANET4, is being designed by Slough-based e-consultancy Logical, using Cisco routers and Worldcom fibre-optic capacity, to link sites in the UK and to connect to the world academic network. It will be the largest Cisco WAN outside Silicon Valley.

In the early 1990s, the UK academic network, JANET, was the fastest X.25 packet-switching network in the world. In 1991, it pioneered IP over X.25 and laid one of the main foundations of the current internet.

Day believes that within a couple of years of the establishment of the 20Gbps system it will have to be upgraded to at least 80Gbps.

Day said: "After that, I believe bandwidth will stop being the main method of increasing capacity. Technology is improving, especially switching technology, and that will be the way we raise capacity."