Just as some sports enthusiasts don't get the lovers of the classical arts, the Research and Education networks can be a bit of a mystery to those who have been operating outside of that community. This includes individuals, institutions, government officials, politicians, students, academics and researchers in the Caribbean and worldwide. It was the needs of the research and education community that initially demanded an unobstructed,  high capacity network in order to better collaborate and function.

"Network performance is a real-time quantity," states Mr. Dai Davis, former General Manager of DANTE/GÉANT, the Pan European Research and Education network in a recent paper. He states that "In order to properly evaluate value for money, it is really necessary to understand the dimensioning and construction of the network that will carry the traffic and the user requirements for performance."

He draws an analogy to the performance of a congested motorway, where traffic slows and ultimately stops. Similarly, with increased traffic on a network, its performance declines and degrades, data is lost and delays occur as the network becomes more loaded. So "when network demand is highest, there will be insufficient capacity to handle the traffic offered."

Mr. Davies further states "Many commercial operators will use the same backbone links for time-sensitive, traffic such as voice, as well as Internet traffic. They will do this by operating a priority queue for voice traffic (which)  further degrade the performance of Internet traffic...The lack of resilience will only affect performance until failure conditions but it can lead to very serious performance degradation."

He concludes that national research and education networks (NRENs) are " generally optimized for performance. They ... are usually dimensioned to carry the expected traffic without loss." In other words, R&E networks operate more like a like a mega highway, free of congestion, delays and data losses.

See Dai Davies' paper on NRENs -The Economic Benefits

Over the past 18+ months of C@ribNET, there have been some "early adopters" and even some of the skeptics utilizing the network. Numerous persons around the Region engaged in knowledge sharing activities in such areas as early childhood development, campus security, dengue and ChickV, high definition medical demonstrations, industrial hygiene and disaster management initiatives. In some cases, international partners have participated, and regularly seek Caribbean involvement in their events.