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By Dominic Maher, 20 June 2000 00:30

NEWS The UK government will invest £50m over three years in a network that will link together more than 700 Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) sites across the UK. Michael Wills MP, Minister for Learning and Technology, is convinced that SuperJanet4 will provide the technological infrastructure that the education sector needs. Wills said: "This is going to be very high bandwidth capacity, faster, quicker, high capacity access for nearly 800 FE and HE institutions in this country. It's got to be a good thing." SuperJanet4 will be run on WorldCom's backbone network with the development and maintenance of the system performed by Ukerna. Geoff McMullen, chief executive at Ukerna, would like to see the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) make more use of the network. He said: "We already provide internet access to quite a few schools and local education authorities and access to the NGfL home page is via Janet, so we're already involved with the NGfL. I think it's possible that SuperJanet4 will provide more access for more schools over the next couple of years. That is an issue the DfEE (Department for Education and Employment) is currently looking at." The network will initially run at 2.5Gbit/s moving up to 20Gbit/s by 2002. The rollout will happen over the coming months and WorldCom expects to give a live demonstration by December 2000.