Juniper Networks today announced that AARNet Pty Ltd (APL) has selected its M-series routing platform for the Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet). APL will deploy Juniper Networks M320, M40e and M20 routing platforms on its new AARNet3 network. APL is the not-for-profit company that is building AARNet3, the third generation of Australia's Academic and Research Network, which will provide high capacity Internet services to Australia's universities, research institutions, education and other related organisations. AARNet serves more than 1,000,000 end users through member institutions and customers. In 2004 AARNet delivered almost 1 petabyte (1024 terabytes) of traffic, and APL expects traffic growth to continue to exceed 50 per cent per year for several years. "AARNet is building one of the world's most advanced and wide reaching networks for future generations," said Chris Hancock CEO of AARNet. "The exciting activities of astronomy, high energy physics and immersive multi-media test the boundaries of our network capacity. Astronomy alone is looking at terabytes nightly. The flow-on effects in network development will benefit communications networks around the world. These networks are now among society's most important infrastructures. They are vital to so many sectors of our economy." The AARNet3 backbone network provides 10 gigabits per second from Perth to Brisbane, enabling customers to connect at gigabit speeds. Juniper Networks M-series will deliver the reliability, scalability and performance required to meet the current and future needs of research and education in Australia. The M-series uses a high-performance architecture and JUNOS, a proven carrier class operating system, ensuring industry-leading reliability, stability and performance to support latency sensitive applications such as voice, video, and mission critical applications. AARNet has a reputation of being at the forefront of network design and innovation and the Juniper Networks platforms will allow AARNet to continue to deliver existing and emerging advanced services to its clients. Mark Prior, AARNet's CTO, said: "AARNet is especially impressed by Juniper's commitment to QA processes and we believe that Juniper's M-series will enable AARNet to continue to support the deployment of advanced IP services. In particular we need to concurrently support IPv6 and multicast traffic, as well as unicast IPv4 traffic, without any loss of performance. We are looking to an operating environment that enhances the robustness of the network and improves reliability and availability." "All sophisticated organisations today depend on reliable communications infrastructure, and research and education institutions in particular must support experimental and leading-edge network applications and rich IP-based media communications," said Shaun Page, vice president of Australia and New Zealand for Juniper Networks. "By selecting the Juniper Networks M-series, APL is ensuring the performance and reliability of AARNet to support these next generation applications."