Research Networking in the Asia-Pacific Region

 Networking in the Asia-Pacific region has developed rapidly in the last five years. Countries such as China and India in particular, with very large populations and significant numbers of highly educated people, are contributing a significant amount to global research and development.

Connectivity to the Asia-Pacific region has been in existence since TEN-155. That project established an interconnect agreement with NII to connect GÉANT to the Japanese research network SINET, in recognition of the need to provide direct, organised connectivity between Asia-Pacific research networks and their European counterparts. Until that point, a number of collaborations between European and Asian research networkers were facilitated by international connectivity organised on an ad-hoc basis.

Collaboration between Asia and Europe brings the experience of participating organisations, encouraging growth in national research networking in the developing countries participating in the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) initiative. Intra-regional development is a key goal of establishing organised interconnections with the Asia-Pacific region.

The TEIN2 project has built on the achievements of the original Trans-Eurasia Information Network (TEIN) project, a link established between France and Korea. It complements other existing initiatives, to ensure that best value is obtained from the funding available. The project combines the expertise and experience of its European and Asian partners in building and managing state-of-the-art research networks.

Alongside TEIN2, the ORIENT project is providing a dedicated link to the Chinese research networks CERNET and CSTNET. It is hoped that the significant synergies between ORIENT and TEIN2 projects can be exploited, bringing bandwidth and reliability benefits to the users of both ORIENT and TEIN2.

The emerging economy of India is making important steps forward, in particular in the areas of mathematics and information technology in which it has traditionally had strengths. ERNET, the Indian research network, has made a significant contribution to this development through its role in the emergence of networking in India. A connection to ERNET from GEANT2 was established in October 2006.