GEANT

GEANT, the pan-European high speed research network, came on-line in November 2001 for a four year period. It links 28 national and regional research and education networks (NREN) in some thirty countries; through these networks, it links over 3,000 institutions.

Funded by the European Commission and run by the DANTE consortium, GEANT's predecessor was TEN-155, a 22,000 km, 155 Mbps ATM network. At its launch, GEANT included nine 10 Gbps core links, and eleven more 2.5 Gbps core links. Several lower-capacity links will upgraded over the life of the project.

GEANT supports production traffic for distributed computing projects (GRID), multicast-native applications, VPNs, and the IPv6 protocol. Three dedicated 2.5 Gbps links connect it to the American research network, Abilene, which makes it a peer to the Abilene backbone in New York and allows it to participate in the International Transit Network (ITN) of Abilene's peers outside the United States – along with CA*net.