Announcement

Belnet has a long-running Scalability Improvement Project, aimed at strengthening the core of the Belnet network and improving connectivity. Recently, significant steps have been taken, including the upgrade of routers and the migration of some Points of Presence (PoPs).

GÉANT will publish in 2025 a new framework agreement for open Cloud solutions (IaaS, PaaS, Saas, etc.).

BOOSTED stands for 'Belgium Optical network for Optical frequency Standards and TimE Dissemination' and aims to develop an optical network for time & frequency (T&F) transfer in Belgium and connect it, via France, to the European metrological network.

At the request of the R&E community, Belnet will set up a DataCite Consortium Belgium begin 2024, a central research dataset registration service allowing Belgian research organisations to register Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for scientific resources.

October is cybersecurity month and this did not go unnoticed within Belnet either. To make our colleagues aware of the dangers of social engineering, we have already organised the 'Piece of Cake' role-playing game developed by our colleagues from the Swiss research and education network SWITCH several times in recent months.

Throughout October, we are paying extra attention to information security. Belnet is actively supporting GÉANT's annual Cyber Security Month campaign. This year's topics include online privacy, phishing, social engineering and ransomware. In a playful four-part video series, we follow Granny Smith, a retired lady who has found a side income in cybercrime.

As you may have heard, since last year Belnet has been involved in the BeQCI project, which aims to deploy a quantum communications network in Belgium. Several partners (universities, public institutions and private companies) have joined forces in a consortium, led by imec.

Federal Public Services (FPSs) are connected by Belnet to one another and to the Internet via FedMAN (Federal Metropolitan Area Network). FedMAN is an essential part of the federal government's IT infrastructure and was fully integrated into the Belnet network about 10 years ago. Recently, in line with the rest of the Belnet network, the FedMAN ring has been running entirely on new equipment from Ciena. Tom De Clercq, one of our network architects, explains the benefits of this renewal and how the network team brought this project to a successful conclusion.

Through EOSC Focus, Belnet is deepening its commitment to Open Science and making this more concrete. EOSC stands for European Open Science Cloud. Belnet, through the EOSC Focus project, is an integral part of the EOSC ecosystem and is therefore best placed to inform Belgian knowledge institutions about European developments within EOSC.

FileSender is a simple and secure tool for quickly sending large files of up to 5 TB, which students, researchers and employees of organisations that are part of the Belnet R&E Federation can use free of charge. User figures show that FileSender is one of the top services in our range. In fact, nearly 1 million files were downloaded via FileSender last year.