SuperJANET: UK networking support for multimedia

Discusses how the use of national data communications in the UK higher education and research community has developed to the point where the availability of such a service is more or less ubiquitous and generally regarded as part of the essential day-to-day infrastructure. This service is provided by the Joint Academic Network, JANET, and resulted from an initiative to forge a single communications facility out of those then existing, with the dual objectives of providing a unified interconnection infrastructure for computer services and individual computers throughout UK higher education and research institutions, and essentially free access to end-users in order to encourage the development of new applications and styles of use. Demand continues to grow, fuelled partly by increasing numbers of systems, especially workstations, being attached and also by the increasing power available at the user´s fingertips. The quest for a viable means of expanding the national backbone capacity has led to the notion of SuperJANET