TERENA COMPENDIUM - Géant

TERENA Compendium of National Research and Education Networks In Europe /Tasks, Staffing, Funding4.3 Total Budgets, 2004 and 2008The following graphs give the total NREN budgets for 2004 and 2008.NREN budgets may fluctuate from year to year, because investments can varyconsiderably. Note that the financial year for JANET(UK) runs from August toJuly. In that case, the 2008 budget is really the 2007/2008 figure.As explained in section 4.2, NRENs have different remits and are organisedin a variety of ways. Some NRENs provide services only to the research and /or education communities in their country while others provide additionalservices; for example, they administer the country-code top-level domainor they connect others who are clearly outside the research or educationcommunities. For the sake of comparability, we have asked NRENs to provideinformation only about the budget for the activities for the research andeducation communities in their countries.There are other reasons why comparisons are difficult:• funding for regional and / or metropolitan area networks is handleddifferently in different countries;• in some countries, clients pay for their line to the nearest NREN Point ofPresence; in others the NREN pays for this;• some spend a large part of their budget connecting primary andsecondary schools; others do not, or may account separately for this;• in section 4.4, it appears that some NRENs do not spend money on salaries.Yet, they do have staff, but the staff is not paid from the NREN budget.Similar situations may apply for other budget categories as well.Even so, a comparison between the budgets of different NRENs is fraughtwith difficulty. We asked NRENs if the budget figure given includes the EUgrant for the GÉANT activity - for some NRENs, this grant is shown in thebudget. For others, it appears as a reduced cost and is not shown in the budget.In graphs 4.3.1 and 4.3.2, the NRENs that include the GÉANT subsidy in theirbudget have been marked with an asterisk. As can be seen in 4.4, the proportionof funds received from the EU (not always for GÉANT only) varies considerablybetween NRENs.87