GÉANT: An Overview

The GÉANT network provides the high-performance, high bandwidth network infrastructure that is fundamental to the European Union’s vision of a European Research Area (ERA). The GÉANT network reaches 40 countries through interconnectivity with its National Research and Education Network (NREN) project partners, delivering seamless connectity to an estimated 40m research and education users across Europe.

The operation of the network is the main activity of the GÉANT project. Now in its third term, the project also advances all aspects of European research and education networking encompassing the network itself, a range of network support and access services, initiatives to address the digitial divide of research and education networking around Europe and technological research to ensure GÉANT continues to be at the forefront of global networking.

There are 34 partners in the project: 32 European NRENs, DANTE and TERENA.

Objectives

The successful GÉANT network and project that lie at the heart of the EU’s e-Infrastructure strategy began a third term in April 2009. The current GÉANT project is focussed on developing and rolling out tools and services to enable the research and education community to gain access to, and obtain the best performance possible from, the network.

GÉANT’s key objectives are to:

• Deliver real value and benefit to society by enabling research communities across Europe (and the world) to transform the way they collaborate on ground-breaking research
• Operate and expand the European backbone network, interconnecting NRENs through high bandwidth links
• Develop and support the GÉANT Service Area, a portfolio of advanced multi-domain network support services, and provide a portfolio of end-user application services for NRENs to deliver to users to ensure seamless network performance
• Pursue initiatives targeted at closing the “digital divide” of research and education networking in Europe and investigate emerging technologies that will help shape the future Internet
  

Funding

The GÉANT network and associated programme of activities is co-funded by the European Commission within the GN3 contract, which is part of the EC’s Seventh R&D Framework Programme (often referred to as FP7). The remainder of the funding is provided by the NRENs partners. The contract between the project partners and the European Commission provides total funding from the EC of 93 million euro for four years from 1 April 2009.