The work to provision this network has now been completed and services are live. The project delivers a 10Gb core network infrastructure and high bandwidth connections to all of the 10 higher education institutions, 3 research organisations and 41 further education colleges in south west England over a 400km of optical infrastructure stretching from Cornwall to Gloucestershire.
The network contract, worth £4.1M for the initial term, is designed to support the growing demand for communications traffic and was won in an open public tender. It provides a secure and resilient infrastructure for the research and educational organisations in the region, enabling Janet’s customers to exploit the benefits cloud computing and other high bandwidth applications. The project was delivered on time and has met all the needs for potential increases in capacity.
Gary Blake, Janet’s project manager said: “The new network provided by Surf Telecoms enables substantial growth in capacity for the connected institutions over the lifetime of the contract. Surf Telecoms has successfully delivered the 55 connections for all of the higher education institutions, further education colleges and research councils in the South West region.
“Working with Surf Telecoms has been a positive experience. Their team on this project has been very responsive to our needs”.
The diverse requirements of the universities, colleges and research councils had to be accommodated by the network and Surf Telecoms has met the exacting standards applied by Janet across the whole country. The increase in capacity is designed to meet the present and future business needs of universities and colleges, and allow them to successfully compete for students on the basis of world class internet access. The network is designed to support significant increases in data transfer rates between institutions, and the growth of both video traffic and social networking.
Surf’s Commercial Manager Steve Blew commented, “We are delighted to have won this tender to supply the Janet network in the south west region. Our network service to Janet is supported by a new state-of-the-art communications infrastructure with the functionality and flexibility to handle high bandwidth traffic required by educational institutions across the region and the connections for onward integration to other parts of the Janet network as well as other national and international telecommunications networks.”
The Janet network in the south west ranges from University College Falmouth in Cornwall to the University of Gloucestershire in the north east of the region and also serves the much larger university campuses in Bath and Bristol.