New sustainable 100 Gbps link is set to boost research and education collaboration between Asia Pacific region and Europe with shorter, faster, cheaper connectivity.
Tallinn, Estonia, 18 June 2019 – An international consortium of six research and education (R&E) networks, including AARNet (Australia), GÉANT (Europe), NORDUnet (European Nordics), SingAREN (Singapore), SURF (The Netherlands) and TEIN*CC (Asia-Pacific), today announced the launch of Collaboration Asia Europe-1 (CAE-1), a new high performing 100 gigabit per second (Gbps) link between Singapore and London for research and education.
This new link will provide additional capacity to meet the rapidly growing bandwidth needs of trans-national education and data-intensive science collaborations between Europe and the Asia Pacific region.
By working together, the consortium of six R&E networks, operating across 11 time zones, was able to procure far beyond what a single R&E network could procure across such a vast 13,000 kilometre distance.
NORDUnet CEO René Buch elaborates:
“The Consortium achieved what no single NREN could accomplish. The CAE-1 Project has paved the way for future collaborations by providing significant connectivity for our constituency at far less cost.”
Shorter, faster, cheaper
CAE-1 is a significant step forward to closing the high-speed connectivity gap between Asia and Europe, providing shorter, faster and cheaper connectivity for research and education.
The new CAE-1 100 Gbps link is routed via the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. This path between the two continents is more direct than the links routed via the North Atlantic Ocean, across North America and across the Pacific Ocean that have carried much of the R&E traffic to date.
A more direct and shorter route between Asia and Europe secures lower latency and reduced costs, two important factors in the race to meet customer demands due to increasing R&E traffic between the two continents.
Official launch at TNC19 – Europe’s largest R&E networking conference
During the official CAE-1 launch, the signing of the Consortium Agreement took place at the TNC19 Conference in Tallinn, Estonia, 18 June.
After initial testing that began on 15 April, the link went into production in May 2019.
The Global Network Architecture
CAE-1 is closely connected to other intercontinental R&E network collaborations established recently, such as the ANA (Advanced North Atlantic Collaboration, a collaboration across the North Atlantic Ocean) and the APR (AsiaPacific Ring, a collaboration between Asia and the USA).
These initiatives are all implementations of the GNA (Global Network Architecture), an international effort to develop a set of global collaboration principles, on a technical level as well as in regards to sharing costs and aligning investments. The GNA has defined a reference architecture and created a roadmap for both national and regional R&E networks to seamlessly support bandwidth for research and education. These collaborative implementations are referred to as the GREN, the Global R&E Network.
NORDUnet CEO René Buch says:
“For NORDUnet, CAE-1 is a ground breaking step forward in building the Global Research & Education Network (GREN) Infrastructure, as it demonstrates the advantages of collaboration and the power of procuring together in consortia.”
For more details please see the attached press release
