The Days Of Gigabyte Is Over

GÉANT has been upgraded to a maximum capacity of two terabits per second, with individual researchers and scientists able to enjoy connections of up to 100 gigabits per second.

        European scientists are pumping out an ever-increasing amount of data – just look at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider experiments for example – so here’s some welcome news for them: GÉANT, Europe’s research data backbone, has just completed a two terabits-per-second (2Tbps) upgrade.

         That’s a whopping amount of capacity for the network, which connects Europe’s national research and education networks (NRENs) with one another and also with overseas counterparts – in total, the network takes in 32,000 universities, schools, research institutes, hospitals and so on. And the result is just as impressive for individual researchers, who will now get connection speeds of up to 100Gbps each – that’s 1,000 times more than the pretty darned impressive cable connection I’m using as I type, and about 10 times the maximum they could hope for before the upgrade.

            The self-healing network offers capacity of up to 500Gbps today, with 2Tbps being the maximum that can be exploited in future. Entry into the terabit era will probably be necessary for handling the data spewing out of the Large Hadron Collider and other sources, including the upcoming Square Kilometre Array, the largest radio telescope ever, which is being constructed in South Africa and Australia.

            The upgrade meant renewing 50,000km (31,000 miles) of backbone, plus putting in new equipment – the backbone’s 500Gbps “super-channels” use Infinera’s DTN-X optical transmission platform, while the 100Gbps end-user speeds come courtesy of Juniper’s MX-series routers.