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The Janet Network: delivering mission-critical services for UK education and research

Neil Shewry headshot
by
Neil Shewry

An in-depth look at how Jisc provides the power to connect, collaborate and improve the student experience.

Students sitting at a table with laptops

What’s 39 years old, more than 18,000km long and runs 20,000 times faster than the average home broadband?

What also helps CERN search for dark matter, enables ground-breaking astronomical observations and contributes to the advancement of modern medicine?

What, at the same time, gives around five million students across the UK uninterrupted access to online learning? As well as esports. And Netflix.

The answer is Janet.

A network of 18 million users

When it was established in 1984, the Janet Network gave academics in 60 UK universities and research councils access to high-speed internet connections for the first time.

Today, more than 900 organisations are connected to Janet, including all the UK’s further and higher education institutions as well as all the research councils and research institutions.

The network also carries traffic between many schools, local authorities and other public bodies.

It connects 18 million users across the UK, not only to the global internet but also to dozens of cloud service providers like AWS and Google, content providers like Akamai and the BBC, and global tech companies such as Apple and Meta.

Janet also hosts the entire cache of Netflix content on-net, a service that means students have the best possible experience when relaxing with their favourite entertainment, whenever they feel like it.

How does Janet work?

Operated and managed by Jisc, the Janet Network has a robust backbone that contains 9,000 km of fibre-optic cable (more than enough to stretch from London to Silicon Valley) and runs at 800 megabits per second capacity (that’s around 20,000 times faster than the average home broadband).

14 regional networks comprising a further 9,000 km of cable extend that connectivity to all corners of the UK, enabling institutions to improve the student experience with rich learning resources and wellbeing services that help them achieve their potential.

Currently, Janet carries around six petabytes of data each day. That's more than a quintillion bytes, or the equivalent of about 100 billion digital photos.

With more than 600 direct peerings, Janet provides cost-efficient external connectivity for institutions without their traffic ever needing to touch the public internet. This allows Jisc members to access off-net resources via providers like Microsoft to support their business functions, as well as media providers like Netflix.

Currently, Janet carries around six petabytes of data each day. That's more than a quintillion bytes, or the equivalent of about 100 billion digital photos.

And three terabytes per second transit capacity means it can easily handle bulk transfers of research data to help CERN search for dark matter and researchers gain new insights into health and disease.

Enabling innovative teaching and learning, The Janet Network delivers the secure high-speed connectivity that underpins collaboration and drives efficiencies across UK education and research.

It’s also key to enabling innovative teaching and learning: the infrastructure is agile enough to scale as the sector increasingly adopts network-reliant technologies like virtual reality and immersive learning spaces.

Without Janet, the transfer of the massive amounts of data which enable the sector to function would be a lot slower, a lot more expensive, a lot less secure and a lot less reliable. If it happened at all.

As Dr Matt Williams, research software engineer at the University of Bristol, points out:

"Janet provides us with a very stable high-speed connection to the cloud providers. If we didn’t have access to the Janet Network, we would have to use smaller amounts of data. We wouldn’t be able to do our jobs.”

Enhancing the student experience

Janet provides the huge amounts of bandwidth students need to enjoy a high-quality seamless and uninterrupted online experience, whether they’re studying, playing esports or streaming content.

Esports can pose a particular challenge.

With unpredictable numbers of users participating simultaneously, esports events can cause massive surges in demand on an institution’s network, potentially disrupting other essential IT services.

Esports can pose a particular challenge... Secure, agile connectivity on and off-campus makes Janet the ideal infrastructure for meeting these needs: it’s specifically engineered so that it has enough bandwidth to cope with any surges in demand.

Handling this challenge requires a super-fast network capable of allocating bandwidth where it is most needed.

Secure, agile connectivity on and off-campus makes Janet the ideal infrastructure for meeting these needs: it’s specifically engineered so that it has enough bandwidth to cope with any surges in demand.

Scalable services and cyber security

As well as delivering resilient high-speed connectivity, the Janet Network enables Jisc to offer an expanding range of services to members. Janet’s unified architecture makes scalable bandwidth and service provision easy.

By creating resilient rings based on a combination of telephone exchanges, carrier-neutral data centres, dark fibre and a range of ethernet and optical-based services, Jisc ensures that cyber security and resilience are implicit in that architecture.

As cyber threats become more sophisticated and more frequent, our experts provide effective cyber security services to Janet Network users as standard.

Looking to the future

The Janet Network continues to evolve to meet future requirements - in terms of both capacity to carry an ever-increasing amount of traffic and innovation to foster new ways of working.

As the sector increasingly adopts network-reliant technologies like virtual reality and immersive learning spaces, and demands a broader set of services, Jisc invests an average of £12 million capital each year to upgrade the network infrastructure, increase capacity and improve connectivity.

Jisc’s vision is to make the latest technologies available to UK education and research via Janet in a way that’s easy to access, secure, and cost-effective to use - whether that’s 5G, edge computing or hybrid cloud.

Further information

Explore the benefits of Janet and hear about Jisc’s exciting new innovations in next-generation networking at Networkshop 2023, 14-15 June at Nottingham Trent University.

In particular, Rob Evans, chief network architect at Jisc will be presenting the Hitchhikers guide to the network session on 16 June to offer an in-depth look at how Janet works and what the future holds for the network.

About the author

Neil Shewry headshot
Neil Shewry
Director of networks

I am responsible for Janet Network strategy, architecture, design, build, in-life management and product portfolio.