Bristol, UK - 24th July 2012 - Surf Telecoms, a leading communications provider, announced today that it has won a three-year contract to provide communications services to Janet, the UK's research and educational network. The work to provision this network has now been completed and services are live. The project delivers a 10Gb core network infrastructure and high bandwidth connections to all of the 10 higher education institutions, 3 research organisations and 41 further education colleges in south west England over a 400km of optical infrastructure stretching from Cornwall to Gloucestershire.

The network contract, worth £4.1M for the initial term, is designed to support the growing demand for communications traffic and was won in an open public tender. It provides a secure and resilient infrastructure for the research and educational organisations in the region, enabling Janet's customers to exploit the benefits cloud computing and other high bandwidth applications. The project was delivered on time and has met all the needs for potential increases in capacity.

Gary Blake, Janet's project manager said: "The new network provided by Surf Telecoms enables substantial growth in capacity for the connected institutions over the lifetime of the contract. Surf Telecoms has successfully delivered the 55 connections for all of the higher education institutions, further education colleges and research councils in the South West region.

"Working with Surf Telecoms has been a positive experience. Their team on this project has been very responsive to our needs".

The diverse requirements of the universities, colleges and research councils had to be accommodated by the network and Surf Telecoms has met the exacting standards applied by Janet across the whole country. The increase in capacity is designed to meet the present and future business needs of universities and colleges, and allow them to successfully compete for students on the basis of world class internet access. The network is designed to support significant increases in data transfer rates between institutions, and the growth of both video traffic and social networking.

Surf's Commercial Manager Steve Blew commented, "We are delighted to have won this tender to supply the Janet network in the south west region. Our network service to Janet is supported by a new state-of-the-art communications infrastructure with the functionality and flexibility to handle high bandwidth traffic required by educational institutions across the region and the connections for onward integration to other parts of the Janet network as well as other national and international telecommunications networks."

The Janet network in the south west ranges from University College Falmouth in Cornwall to the University of Gloucestershire in the north east of the region and also serves the much larger university campuses in Bath and Bristol.

About Surf Telecoms
Surf Telecoms delivers state of the art telecommunications services across the whole of the mainland UK. Having expanded its services from its installed base in the South West of England and Wales Surf Telecoms now offers a range of telecoms services from 2mb leased lines to 10Gb optical wavelengths, dark fibre and secure colocation and site sharing facilities. Together with agreements with other communications providers Surf offers network coverage that is not limited by the geography of its own network.

Headquartered in Bristol, Surf Telecoms operates from regional offices across the Midlands, South West and Wales offering quality, standard and bespoke communications services including Dark Fibre, Optical Wavelengths, Ethernet over MPLS, Storage Area Networks and Communications Sites with secure Colocation facilities.

For additional information about Surf Telecoms please visit www.surftelecoms.co.uk

About Janet
Janet provides a world-class network infrastructure to meet the needs of the UK's research and education community. The Janet backbone consists of over 5,000 km of dedicated optical fibre, which can run at 100Gbit/s. With over 25 years of uninterrupted service to date, the Janet network now has a community of 18 million users. Janet additionally provisions services, including videoconferencing, voice and cloud computing.

The concept of a community underpins everything Janet does and the network is based on the need for organisations to communicate, collaborate and co-operate in the shared interests of education and research.

Janet manages the operation and development of the network on behalf of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) for the UK Further and Higher Education Funding Councils with the primary aim of providing and developing a network infrastructure that meets the needs of the research and education communities. JISC also works in partnership with the Research Councils.

To find out more, please visit www.ja.net

Steve Blew
Commercial Manager
sblew@westernpower.co.uk
telephone +44 (0) 1823 348704