What Is Research Networking and Why Is It Important?

Research networking is the provision of data communications networks for the use of the research and academic community. The networks are used to transfer data and to support experiments and applications, which are crucial to academic research. Without high-speed research networks, many research projects at the forefront of their fields would be simply unable to exist.

Research networking activity is seen as having an important contribution to make towards maintaining European competitiveness and supporting economic development.  The involvement of organisations from so many countries in pan-European research networking is a very good example of the sort of European cooperation which is fundamental to the objectives of the European Union itself.  The current pan-European research network backbone, GÉANT, in fact precedes the expansion of the European Union by already including all of the current accession countries – and several others - within its reach. 

European research networking also assists cohesion – the notion of narrowing the economic development differential between countries – by helping provide the ability for all researchers, wherever in Europe they work, to participate in collaborative research projects and contribute to the best of their abilities.

Research networks have two primary objectives. They exist as an infrastructure support to researchers. In addition, they have a research role in their own right, implementing new services in advance of the general marketplace for telecommunications. They are ideally placed to do this as their users are generally computer and communications literate and are prepared to experiment with new technology. DANTE is an active participant in the development of new networking services to support European research.