LEARN Selects Nokia To Deploy New High-capacity Network To Foster Research And Education In Texas

Nokia announced its collaboration with The Lonestar Education and Research Network, the statewide Research and Education Network for the state of Texas, to upgrade LEARN’s existing packet platform. The collaboration is part of LEARN’s strategic NextGen Network initiative, which aims to replace routers across the LEARN backbone and modernize the existing statewide network, significantly advancing the network’s infrastructure and the ability to serve its members. Nokia’s solution will enhance the levels of scalability, security, and reliability over a 400GE backbone, as part of a broad project redesign led by LEARN to serve its more than 300 organizations that directly or indirectly rely upon its network.

The collaboration with Nokia represents a significant milestone as LEARN celebrates the upcoming 20th anniversary of its passage of first light. The relationship with Nokia highlights LEARN’s commitment to providing advanced, high-performance networking technology solutions for research and education. The next generation of the network will meet the highest performance and reliability standards, benefiting LEARN members by enhancing network performance, ensuring seamless integration, providing future-proof technology, increasing operational efficiency, and improving network reliability and resiliency. 

The LEARN network spans over 3,200 fiber route miles, serving over 300 direct and affiliate member organizations throughout Texas, including public and private higher education institutions, colleges, and K–12 public schools. The enhanced IP/MPLS core network from Nokia delivers the performance, scale, and speed that are required to support cloud-hosted applications, compute-intensive processing, and the exchange of massive data sets required by LEARN Member Institutions.

Kerry Mobley, President and CEO of LEARN, said: “LEARN is looking ahead to ensure we continue to meet the evolving demands of research, education, and collaboration for years to come. As network traffic increases due to technological advancements, we are committed to providing scalable and resilient services to support the needs of our members. Partnering with Nokia to help modernize our next-gen network allows us to implement cutting-edge, future-ready solutions that enhance our ability to empower the research and education communities across Texas.”

Matt Young, Head of Enterprise Sales for North America at Nokia, said: “Research and Education networks like LEARN are experiencing unprecedented data growth with advancements in cloud and AI, which is compounded by the compute intensive processing and exchange of huge data sets within their communities. Our leadership in networking technologies and the extensive experience providing some of the highest performance networks on the planet have allowed us to gain momentum in the market, providing our customer with a robust network infrastructure with enhanced scalability, security, and reliability. We are pleased to be a part of LEARN’s network evolution project as they help foster scientific research, collaboration and innovation in Texas.”

The Nokia IP/MPLS platform leverages in-house developed leading-edge FP5 network processing silicon and is designed to scale in support of the most demanding workloads. A layer of network protection is integrated directly into the chipset, ensuring the integrity of research data as security threats – such as DDoS attacks and data breaches – grow in size and severity. Innovations in power consumption deliver a 75 percent reduction in energy use over earlier routing chipsets.

National/regional research and education networks (NRENs) are non-commercial networks created for the advancement of knowledge. They demand performance, sometimes on the edge of what is commercially practical. They require unusual bandwidth capacity, scalability, flexibility, and data security without the constraints often found in commercial service offerings. Advances in photonic transport and switching, combined with IP routing and open software control, bring NRENs the ability to better serve their communities with a powerful communications infrastructure that will further education, scientific and industrial research, commerce, and overall quality of life – fostering collaboration among institutions.

Source: Nokia media announcement