Brussels 12/01/2004 (Agence Europe) - The plan to extend and network research and education in South-East Europe (SEEREN) will extend the high speed pan-European research network (GEANT) to the Balkans. This will make it easier for researchers in the Balkans to participate in common research and training programmes with the rest of Europe. The new infrastructure, for which the European Commission has earmarked EUR 1.3 million, will provide broadband internet connections between research and education networks in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia Montenegro, as an extension of the GÉANT backbone network of Europe.
GEANT provides a very high capacity Internet backbone offering the greatest geographical coverage of any network of its kind in the world (from Iceland to the Caucasus). It has a dual role of providing an infrastructure to support the advanced communication needs of the scientific community, as well as providing an infrastructure for research on state-of-the-art communication technologies itself. It is co-funded by the EU under the 5th R&D Framework Programme, with a budget of EUR 80 million over four years as part of the SEEREN programme aiming to bridge the digital gap between the Balkans and the rest of Europe. The SEEREN consortium received funding at local, European and international level.