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An initiative started in 1989, under the Computer Board, withthe aim of developing of a national broadband network tosupport UK higher education and research. The preparatorywork culminated in 1992 with the award of a contract worth 18Mpounds to British Telecom to provide networking services overa four year period that extends to March 1997.The BT contract will provide a national network with twocomponents: a high speed, configurable bandwidth networkserving up to 16 sites, initially using PDH to be replacedwith SDH, and a high speed switched data service (SMDS)serving 50 or more sites. The primary role of the PDH/SDHcomponent will be to support the development and deployment ofan ATM network. These components will be complemented byseveral high performance Metropolitan Area Networks eachserving several closely located sites. The aim is to provide,within the first year of the project, a pervasive networkcapable of supporting a large and diverse user community.The network has two parts, an IP data network and an ATMnetwork, both operating at 34Mbit/s. Early in August 1993 thepilot IP network was transferred to full service and wasconfigured to provide a trunk network for JIPS, the JANET IPService.In November 1993 work was well advanced on the next phasewhich aims to extend SuperJANET to a large number of sites.The pilot four site ATM network will be extended to servetwelve sites and will expand the scope of the video network.The principal vehicle used for the expansion of the datanetwork will be the SMDS service provided by BT. Most ofthe work associated with the development of this phase isexpected to be completed by the end of March 1994.[Joint Network Team, Network News 40, ISSN 0954 - 0636]. (ftp://osiris.jnt.ac.uk/pub/newsfiles/documents/netwnews/news40+/news40.para).[Current status?]