The contract for the current JANET backbone reached the end of its initial term in December 2006. To advise the UK Funding Bodies of the functionality required of a successor, known as SuperJANET5, the JISC Committee for Networking (JCN) asked JANET(UK) to carry out a review of requirements.
A distinguishing feature of a National Research and Education Network (NREN) is, and must continue to be, the flexibility to meet in a cost effective manner the diverse range of production and development demands across the user community. This is the key challenge that SuperJANET5 must address and the following document describes the results of the requirements analysis at: http://www.webarchive.ja.net/SJ5/requirementsanalysis/an-architecture-for-diversity.pdf
The JANET backbone is used by the Regional Broadband Consortia in England as a national broadband interconnect, enabling the RBCs to collaborate at a national as well as regional level, and allowing content and applications of common interest to be accessable to all. During the SuperJANET5 requirements analysis phase Becta and the RBCs, supported by JANET(UK), undertook an exercise to specify the requirements of SuperJANET5 for the Schools networks. The results of this specification exercise are available in the document 'RBC/LA SuperJANET5 Specification Requirements'.
