European Union researchers using the GEANT network will, from Wednesday, be able to access capacity of up to 2 terabits per second.

GEANT is the superfast pan-European research network that helped discover the Higgs Boson particle at the CERN Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. It was also the only Internet connection to Egypt during the so-called Arab Spring revolution in 2011, according to the European Commission.

The upgrade to the network began in September 2012 and was coordinated by DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), which leads the project consortium of 41 partners.

Using the Infinera DTN-X optical transmission platform deployed on the GEANT backbone — comprising 8,592 kilometers of fiber — and 35 Juniper MX series universal routers, testers were able to activate 2T bps of long-haul superchannel optical capacity in June. The test route was between Amsterdam and Frankfurt, as this was deemed to be one of the busiest in Europe.

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