JANET

From Freepedia

See also: Janet

JANET is a British, private, government-funded computer network dedicated to education and research. All further- and higher-education organizations are connected to JANET, as are all the Research Councils and several metropolitan area networks in the UK. The name was originally a contraction of Joint Academic NETwork: as this title excludes the network's connections with education and research, it is now known as JANET in its own right.

History

JANET developed out of a number of local and research networks dating back to the 1970s. In the early 80s a standardization and interconnect effort started, hosted on an expansion of the pioneering SERCnet X.25 research network. The system first went live in April 1983, hosting about 50 sites with line speeds of 9.6 kbit/s. In the mid-80s the backbone was upgraded to a 2 Mbit/s backbone with 64 kbit/s access links, and a further upgrade in the early 1990s sped the backbone to 8 Mbit/s and the access links to 2 Mbit/s, making JANET the fastest X.25 network in the world.

The JANET effort resulted in the standarization known as the Coloured Book protocols, which provided the first complete X.25 standard. There had been some talk of moving JANET to OSI protocols in the 1990s, but changes in the networking world meant this never happened.

In January 1991 the JANET IP Service (JIPS) was set up as a pilot project to host IP traffic on the existing network. Within ten months the IP traffic had exceeded the levels of X.25 traffic, and the IP support became official in November. Today JANET is primarily a high-speed IP network.

In order to address speed concerns, several hardware upgrades have been incorporated into the JANET system. In 1989 SuperJANET was proposed, to re-host JANET on a fibre optic network. Work started in late 1992, and by late 1993 the first 14 sites had migrated to the new 32 Mbit/s ATM system. SuperJANET also moved solely to IP.

In 1995 SuperJANET II started, adding 155 Mbit/s ATM backbones and a 10 Mbit/s SMDS network encompassing some of the original JANET nodes. JANET's mandate now included running metropolitan area networks centered on these sites.

SuperJANET III created new 155 Mbit/s ATM nodes to fully connect all of the major sites at London, Bristol, Manchester and Leeds, with 34 Mbit/s links to smaller sites around the country.

In March 2001 SuperJANET4 was launched. The key challenges for SuperJANET4 was the need to increase network capacity and to strengthen the design and management of JANET to allow it to meet a similar increase in the size of its userbase.

SuperJANET4 saw the implementation of a 2.5Gbit/s core backbone from which connections to regional network points of presence were made at speeds ranging between 155Mbit/s to 2.5Gbit/s depending upon the size of the regional network. In 2002 the core SuperJANET4 backbone was upgraded to 10Gbit/s.

SuperJANET4 also saw an increase in the userbase of JANET with the inclusion of the Further Education Community and the use of the SuperJANET4 backbone to interconnect schools networks.

Work is currently (2005) underway to procure SuperJANET 5, the next generation of the backbone which will include the ability to dedicate connections to specific projects using Wavelength-division multiplexing. This is scheduled to be deployed during 2006.

JANET is linked to other European and worldwide NRENs through GEANT, has a private connection to CERNET in China and peers extensively with other ISPs at Internet Exchange Points in the UK.

JANET is operated by a consortium known as the United Kingdom Education and Research Networking Association (UKERNA), who are also responsible for the .ac.uk and .gov.uk domains.