Wikipedia: JANET

The Joint Academic NETwork is a British private, government funded network for education and research. All further and higher education organisations are connected to JANET as are all the [Research Council]?s and [Metropolitan Area Network]?s in the UK. JANET is connected to the equivalent academic networks in other countries and to many commercial networks in the UK and abroad forming part of the global internet.

JANET is the network operated and developed by the [United Kingdom Education and Research Networking Association]? (UKERNA) under a Service Level Agreement from the [Joint Information Systems Committee]? (JISC) of the UK Higher and Further Education Funding Councils.

JANET was set up in 1983 as a development of SERCNET?. It initially ran on X.25? protocols and served around 50 sites with line speeds of 9.6 Kb/s. By the late 1980s there were around 200 sites connected to a 2 Mb/s backbone. Services were standardised by the [Coloured Book protocols]?. By the early 1990s JANET was the fastest X.25 network in the world.

But the JANET IP Service (JIPS) was set up in 1991, initially a pilot project within ten months IP traffic had exceeded the levels of X.25 traffic. The move to IP was boosted by SuperJANET?, which started in 1993 using a 34 Mb/s network initially among 14 sites and 10 Mbit/s SMDS access to around 50 sites. SuperJANET? II started in 1995 to increase the spread of JANET and helped to create a number of Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) using IP over ATM over a combination of 155 Mb/s and 34 Mb/s curcuits. SuperJANET? III is the current network - consolidating SuperJANET? and SuperJANET? II. A 155 Mbit/s ATM backbone was installed between London, Bristol, Manchester and Leeds. The network was extended using 34 Mbit/s and 155 Mbit/s links from which connections to other sites were made.