A thousand words?

It has been suggested that I start to include photos in my weekly Janet6 blog updates. It might be a struggle some weeks to make this in any way interesting or relevant, but I might as well give it a go. This week’s photo is from a visit to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). It was a gloriously crisp and freezing morning, and the photo is nothing more than a view from the main entrance, the building in the centre of the photo however is more relevant as it’s the location of one of the Regional Network Entry Points that will connect Janet6 to the Thames Valley Network. As well as being (I think) our biggest single user of bandwidth, RAL is in the unique position of being a customer of Janet, a supplier to Janet, and also a neighbour of Janet – my ‘visit’ was in fact nothing more than a 5 minute walk across the Harwell Oxford campus on which we both reside.

The other major thing to report this week is that we have reached an important point in the work we’re doing with SSET to provision the fibre element of the network. Over the past weeks and months a considerable amount of work has gone into debating, tweaking, amending and generally fiddling with the finer details of the fibre design. This week, courtesy of a 4 hour meeting between Janet and SSET, has seen a key milestone reached in that we have now agreed on and committed to the full and final fibre design. The majority of fibre routes have been confirmed since contract signature back in August, but it’s the few niggling issues we’ve been working through that have been resolved this week. It’s now a case of full speed ahead to deliver the fibre network by 31 March 2013.