§ Mrs. Curtis-ThomasTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment what assessment he has made of the costs of upgrading the existing IT structure within the universities to allow individual academics access to JANET 4, broken down by research council. [122136]
§ Mr. WicksWe have allocated approximately £150 million to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) for capital investment in information and communications technology over the period 1999–2000 to 2001–02. The improvement in the backbone to the JANET network, SuperJANET4, is being met from top-sliced funding from all the HE Funding Councils, of which HEFCE's contribution is £40 million. Individual higher education institutions and research102W councils wanting to enhance their local area networks to exploit the extra bandwidth available will need to fund this from within their annual grant allocation.