Janet has been granted additional funding of GBP2.7m to support the expansion of its Aurora fibre network.
As one of the largest research test-beds in Europe, the Aurora network was developed in 2006/7 to interconnect the research groups at the universities of Cambridge, Essex and UCL and enable research groups to pursue their research, away from the constraints of a production service network.
The additional funding will enable the Aurora infrastructure to be connected to the research groups at the universities of Aston and Southampton, and extend the operating period of the enlarged network to April 2011.
Janet will be continuing its business relationship with ntl:Telewest Business to extend the infrastructure, and fibre connections to the two additional sites are expected to be completed by the end of April 2009.
Early work supported by Aurora was based on the transfer and expansion of existing work, but other projects are now starting to take shape, enabled by the new infrastructure; these include those awaiting submission to research council funding programmes.
Professor David Richardson, deputy director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at Southampton University says: 'A direct connection to the Aurora fibre network will allow us to work much more closely with our partners around the UK to develop and properly trial the new components, subsystems and network concepts required to support future generations of the Internet.' Already, a number of important national and EU-funded research projects are taking place over the network.
The Aurora infrastructure is also beginning to attract international attention from research communities considering directions for a future Internet.
These typically need deep access to network infrastructures, which is exactly the service that Janet Aurora and Janet Lightpath provide.
