DANTE's Planning and Development

Planning

Michael Enrico
Planning Manager

Michael Enrico received his BSc and PhD degrees in physics from Lancaster University in 1991 and 1995. His PhD work involved experimental studies on superfluid helium at ultralow temperatures. After a couple of years working as a research associate, he took a change in career direction and moved into telecommunications. In 1997 he joined what is now BTexact Technologies, working mainly on the study and development of innovative broadband access network architectures based on hybrid fibre-copper infrastructures. He then moved onto working on BT's wholesale broadband platform, focusing on the shorter term requirements of highly scalable IP network transport solution designs.

In 2000, he joined a telecommunications startup as a network architect, where he had responsibility for designing a novel platform capable of supporting wholesale secure broadband access and VPN services with a pan-European footprint.

In December 2001, Michael joined the Network Engineering and Planning team in DANTE, where he now works on projects concerned with the future of pan-European research and education networking. These include studies on the introduction of advanced optical networking technologies, expansion of the current GÉANT service to countries around the Mediterranean through EUMEDCONNECT (part of the EU-funded EUMEDIS programme) and improved support for emerging projects using applications with high network demands (e.g. GRIDS).

In May 2003 Michael was promoted to Network Planning Manager.

Guy Roberts

Guy Roberts received his BEng degree from RMIT University in Australia in 1991 and his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2006.  His PhD research into semiconductor optical amplifier based optical switching for computer interconnect applications was conducted in collaboration with Intel Research Cambridge.  He has wide ranging commercial experience in the telecommunications sector beginning in Australia in Telstra’s SDH transmission project group where he was involved in introducing SDH technology into their network.  In 1995 he moved to Fujitsu Australia where in his product architecture role he contributed to the development of Fujitsu’s multiservice access platform FSX2000. In 1999 Guy relocated to the UK to work for Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe where he was their key technical consultant for system integration and testing of Fujitsu’s DSL platform the FDX.

In July 2006 Guy joined the Network Engineering and Planning team in DANTE, where he now works on projects concerned with the future of pan-European research and education networking.  One of his current interests is the “Bandwidth on Demand” research project which is aimed at investigating and developing an end-to-end (and therefore multi-domain) bandwidth allocation and reservation service.

Nicolas Simar

Nicolas Simar graduated as a Computer Science Engineer (Ingénieur Civil Informaticien) from the University of Liège (Belgium) in September 2000. He did his dissertation on IP QoS in the Networking Research Unit (Professor Guy Leduc) in collaboration with Cisco Systems (Eric Vyncke).

Nicolas joined DANTE in October 2000. He was an active member of the SEQUIN project defining and studying the deployment of the Premium IP service on a multi-domain environment. He is involved in the deployment of the Premium IP and Less than Best Effort IP QoS service on GÉANT. One of his current interests is the deployment of a multi-domain performance monitoring infrastructure (delay, jitter and packet loss monitoring).