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El contrato para la nueva red paneuropea GÈANT, que sucederá a TEN-155 en el 2001, ha sido firmado por la Comisión Europea el 31 de octubre de 2000.

España formará parte del consorcio que la Comisión financiará con un total de 80 millones de euros.

Incluimos una copia de la nota de prensa que anunciaba el compromiso que ha sido finalmente firmado.

Para más información sobre GEANT: http://www.dante.net/geant/

IP/00/1118
Brussels, 5 October 2000

Commission supports upgrade of Trans-European Internet research network
through 80 million euro GÈANT project

The European Commission has agreed to sign a 80 million euro contract with
the GÈANT Consortium, to put in place a 2,5Gbit/s trans-European Internet
backbone for research purposes. This represents a major step in the
practical implementation of the eEurope action plan and marks an important
move in Europe¹s evolution towards Internet II. With GÈANT having already
launched its tendering process to procure the necessary capacity and points
of presence in 30 countries, all is now in place for network operations to
begin early in 2001. Additional moves to extend these high-speed links from
Europe to the research backbones of the USA and Asian regions are foreseen
at later stages of the project.


Mr Erkki Liikanen, Commissioner responsible for Enterprise and the
Information Society, said: "The adoption of GÉANT by the Commission is a
clear demonstration that implementation of e-Europe is running to schedule.
The ambition of the Feira European Council to evolve European research
networks to 100 Gbit/s or more in the near future represents a further
40-fold increase in capacity: the real issue will be the impetus that this
can bring to the research community of Europe in a cost efficient way."
GÈANT will increase the geographic coverage of Europe¹s internet backbone
from 24 to 30 countries, and increase its capacity by a factor of 16 times
to that provided by the previous 155Mbit/s technology. Such a European
development will be in a position to match, and to complement developments
taking place at national levels.  By offering a guaranteed quality of
service, GÈANT seeks to encourage the emergence of new applications amongst
the research community. This will also enlarge the scope of research
disciplines that can rely on such a network, to support their own needs and
goals.

In Europe, state of the art Internet connections amongst leading centres of
research (including those of the accession countries) is seen as a
pre-requisite for increased scientific collaboration and as such, is
considered to be an essential foundation for the creation of a European
Research Area.

In recognising GÈANT as an important step forward, Europe¹s Research Council
meeting in Luxembourg on 15th June 2000 has underlined the importance of
continuing to upgrade the European Internet backbone.  With this in mind the
Council has already invited the Commission to present initiatives for
further upgrades of capacity to the order of 100Gbit/s.

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Research co-operation is becoming an increasingly global activity. There are
equivalent Internet II initiatives to GÈANT in North America (Abilene and
CAnet) and in the Asia Pacific region (e.g. SINET in Japan, KOREN in Korea
and SingAREN in Singapore). GÈANT will optimise its interconnection with
other world regions by focussing on the management of Global connectivity.