Lan Communications Inks Contract with HEAnet To Build Next Generation Network Backbone

Dublin, Ireland, Friday, 1st February 2008:  Leading network services provider Lan Communications today announced a contract with HEAnet, Ireland's National Education and Research Network to design, build and support a next generation network backbone for the education, research and development community in Ireland.   Based on a Cisco technology platform, the infrastructure will require initial capital investment of more than €2 million and is capable of supporting connections up to 40Gbits per second* each, scaling to 1.2 Terabits per second - making it the fastest and most advanced network architecture in the country.  Funded under the National Development Plan, HEAnet views this as a critical piece of national communications infrastructure.

"Research and development is an essential part of Ireland's economic activity," comments John Boland, CEO, HEAnet.  "Building a world-class, high bandwidth network, capable of supporting the unique demands of this community is critical. This directly underpins the collaborative and challenging objectives of the government's Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for national research programmes.  Our network infrastructure must deliver the speed, scalability and resilience required while achieving maximum return on investment over the lifetime of the project."

The requirement to upgrade the current network backbone to multiples of 10Gbps is not only driven by research imperatives but also by exponential increases in Internet traffic from the education community.  The network will support the country's broadband Internet access requirements for second and third level schools, helping to deliver high quality multimedia to the classroom and promoting innovation and creativity in the learning process. Third level students and researchers can now move into the area of advanced computer simulations at the highest level. This will greatly improve their capacity for research in areas such as climate change, material science, astrophysics and biology where high-end computing is essential for advanced research.

"Designing and building a network infrastructure with such stringent requirements in terms of bandwidth, scalability and resilience was quite a challenge," according to Andrew O'Kelly, managing director, Lan Communications.  "We proposed the Cisco Carrier Routing System, CRS-1 as the only massively scalable system that can truly integrate multiple PoP functions into a single system and provide the critical reliability and flexibility required for successful network and service convergence." 

This deployment represents the industry's only fully modular and distributed routing system that enables service providers to deliver a suite of data, voice, and video services over a highly available and highly scalable IP Next-Generation Network (NGN) infrastructure. 

"We greatly value the technical and project management skills of the Lan Communications team," comments John Boland. "Lan Communications continue to pioneer the most advanced technologies with us, demonstrating a solid understanding of our business and technical requirements in the process."

Ends

Editors Note:  40Gbits per second is equivalent to approx. 20,000 2Mbps broadband lines.

Pictured l-r are;  Fiona Gallagher, senior account manager and Andrew O'Kelly, managing director, Lan Communications and John Boland, CEO, HEAnet

About HEAnet
HEAnet is a world-class provider of high quality Internet services to Ireland's Universities, Institutes of Technology and the research and educational community including primary and post primary schools. HEAnet uses technology that places Ireland amongst the leading countries of the world.
HEAnet plays an essential role in facilitating leading edge research involving national and international collaborations between Irish researchers and students and their colleagues across the globe. It also enables leading researchers to live in Ireland and develop their ideas here.

About Lan Communications
Founded in 1993, Lan Communications is one of the country's leading network services companies.  Boasting a client base of over 1250 customers, it provides government and enterprise clients with innovative yet secure voice, video and data services and true nationwide geographic reach.  Lan Communications prides itself on technical excellence and works in close partnership with market-leading hardware and software vendors, holding some of the industry's highest technical accreditations, many of which are unique to the Irish marketplace.  Lan Communications is a wholly-owned subsidiary of eircom. 

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