History

The NIRAN network grew out of a project initiated in 2001 by the Department for Employment and Learning (DEL) to establish a high-speed telecommunications network for the NI tertiary education sector. With DEL's support, the four Higher Education institutions and the six Further Education colleges in NI formed a company - NIRAN Limited - to serve as the entity to procure, build, operate, and manage the network. The NIRAN network became operational in November 2004.

Raison d'être

NIRAN's core purpose is to connect all NI HE and FE institutions to each other and, via the UK national education network, JANET, to the wider Internet. NIRAN is one of some fourteen regional education networks in the UK which, together, comprise the JANET network. In addition to the NI tertiary education sector, NIRAN delivers high-speed links to a number of public sector institutions across NI, for example, Armagh Observatory, the CAFRE Agricultural Colleges, and Borough Councils, including Belfast City and Derry City Councils.

Bandwidths

The current NIRAN network went live in November 2009, after an EU-procurement and tendering process. NIRAN now delivers individual 1Gigabit (1000 Megabits) circuits to each of its 20 higher and further education campuses - comparable with world-class standards. The non-tertiary education sites enjoy a mix of 10Mbits and 100Mbits circuits, meeting their individual needs.

Network Links

NIRAN has two 2.5Gigabit (2500 Megabits) links to the Internet provided by JANET, offering automatic failover, thereby providing all NIRAN connected sites a high level of resilience to the Internet. The NIRAN network also has inter-connections to the NI Schools network, C2k, and to the Republic of Ireland's education network, HEAnet.