In 2019, NORDUnet co-founded, with European and Asian partners, the Asia–Europe Ring (AER) – a unique collaboration among research and education network (NREN) operators connecting Europe and Asia. The goal was simple yet ambitious: to ensure resilience and enable advanced science by pooling international capacity and supporting one another through mutual backup. Together, the partners have created a robust, shared framework for intercontinental connectivity that allows research networks to operate far beyond what any single operator could achieve alone.
In the six years since its creation, AER has grown both in partners and in capacity. Time and again, the collaboration has demonstrated its importance by protecting partner traffic during cable breaks and ensuring uninterrupted global research connectivity. By building trust and technical alignment across continents, AER has become a key component of the GREN – the global fabric of research and education networks, enabling science at scale between Europe and Asia.
NORDUnet congratulates the teams at NII, QST, and ITER for their outstanding achievement in demonstrating sustained 100 Gbps data transfers between Europe and Asia. Using advanced data transfer protocols and leveraging the power of the AER collaboration, this milestone shows that global research networks are ready to meet the demanding data needs of next-generation scientific projects such as ITER.
This is exactly what we created AER for.
