The question of what research and education (R&E) networks are and how they work is often raised. There is particular interest in understanding the benefits that research and education networking brings to its users, its funders and to individual institutions. A panel of GÉANT (formally DANTE) people got together to shed some light on these important questions.
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Paul Maurice Senior Communications Officer | Helga Spitaler Senior Communications Officer | David West Senior International Relations Officer | Michael Enrico Chief Technical Officer |
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Richard Hughes-Jones Senior Network Advisor | John Chevers Chief Business Development Officer | Thomas Fryer Senior International Relations Officer | Domenico Vicinanza Project Support Officer |
Click on the questions below to see what the panel had to say:
R&E networks are primarily designed to meet the needs of researchers, academics, teachers and students who need to share information and facilities. Each country decides which groups will benefit from its national R&E network and many choose to extend connectivity and services to libraries, hospitals, laboratories and government organisations to enable tele-medicine and other interactive online services.
By overcoming the barriers to education, e-learning can provide new and life-changing opportunities for students. For example, thanks to stable videoconferencing, students in Palestinian universities can now enroll on courses and participate remotely and interactively in lectures held anywhere in the world. R&E networking gives them access to the best educational opportunities where travel difficulties would make it impossible for them to attend in person. Distance learning also helps build a stronger base of skills and knowledge within the community. R&E networks also provide significant benefits for the arts and humanities world. Ancient instruments such as the Greek epigonion, not heard for centuries, can now be played by music students thanks to digital sound reconstructions enabled by compute-intensive platforms. Equally, musicians separated by hundreds of kilometres can now rehearse and perform together remotely following the development of software which requires high bandwidth and a highly reliable network to transmit high quality video and audio with the minimum possible delay. Without the high bandwidth, low jitter and reliability of R&E networks, neither of these projects would be possible." |
The GÉANT network covers Europe and has high-speed links to regional networks in other parts of the world including RedCLARA in Latin America, TEIN3 in Asia-Pacific, CAREN in Central Asia, EUMEDCONNECT2 in North Africa and the Middle East and the UbuntuNet Alliance in Southern and Eastern Africa. GÉANT also connects to US and Canadian R&E networks in North America, to China and to networks in other major research countries including Japan, Russia and India.
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NRENs are not-for-profit organisations and are usually supported by public expenditure in each country. They provide R&E networks at a national level and cooperate to form regional level networks.
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R&E networks are specially designed to meet the more demanding requirements of research projects. They avoid the congestion, delays, interruptions and limitations caused by overbooking and competing traffic on public internet services. R&E networks guarantee dedicated capacity and end-to-end support for time-critical research applications.
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New knowledge and understanding flows from successful research. The more closely researchers work together, the more quickly they can answer questions and find new approaches to resolve all kinds of problems. R&E networks make it easy to share information and knowledge that can improve many different aspects of our lives.
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Research is our key to innovation. We rely on the scientific and academic community to make new discoveries and provide new insights that will help to improve people’s lives. The European Community envisages a ‘European Research Area’ - a border-free research zone that can make Europe the world’s most dynamic and competitive knowledge economy by promoting innovation. By providing common access to the best technological tools, minds and resources, R&E networks around the world enable each place of learning to play its full part in addressing issues of concern to local, national, regional and global communities.
New research environments drive up productivity, improve the quality of the science performed and create synergies between dispersed research groups. GÉANT has helped to deliver the EU’s European Information Society 2010 initiative helping to boost innovation and investment in ICT and establish an inclusive European information society that improves the quality of public services as well as quality of life. R&E networking is also crucial to the EU’s ‘Europe of Knowledge 2020’ vision for university-based research and innovation."
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Network technologies offer economies of scale that make the best performance and services affordable to everyone, but calculating and allocating network costs is complex.
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