In Europe, GEANT already links researchers from Reykjavik to Vladivostok, serving around 30 million users in over 3500 universities and research centres and connecting 34 national research networks. High-speed links will now be established with regional research network infrastructures emerging in the Balkans, the Black Sea and Mediterranean regions, as well Asia, Southern Africa and Latin America. In Europe, GEANT has enabled ground-breaking research collaboration in fields such as climate change, radio astronomy and biotechnology.

GEANT was launched in 2000 as a jointly funded initiative to upgrade Europe’s research and education networking infrastructure with ˆ200 million in total. It was further upgraded to become a world leader and to boost Europe’s attractiveness as a place to do research.

GEANT provides huge technological advances for "big science" such as EXPReS, an EU radio astronomy project. This links the world's largest radio telescopes in China, Europe, South Africa and Chile to a supercomputer in the Netherlands which produces real-time imaging, made possible only by the massive data-flows from the GEANT network.

GEANT also provides global communications support for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the single largest scientific experiment ever undertaken. Going live later this year, it depends on high speed links around the globe for seamless transmission of unprecedented amounts of data (15 million gigabytes/year) to 5,000 scientists working in 500 institutes worldwide.

On the global scene, the Commission recently announced ˆ12 million of funding for TEIN3 (Trans-Eurasia Information Network) a large-scale Asia-Pacific network, as well as high speed links from GEANT to the UbuntuNet Alliance in Africa and the Ukrainian Research and Academic Network (URAN). The Black Sea Interconnection (BSI) project, another EU-funded initiative linking the Black Sea and Southern Caucasus countries to GEANT, will be launched on 1 March in co-ordination with the Turkish National Research and Education Network.

On 3 March, Commissioner Viviane Reding will attend the Global Leader event in Bled (Slovenia) reviewing the achievements of GEANT and its role at the heart of global research networking.