Commissioned in late 2006, REANNZ links to other established regional and national research and education networks, notably to JANET in the UK and to the Pacific Northwest Gigapop in Seattle.

REANNZ consists of a high-speed optical network connecting points of presence (PoPs) throughout New Zealand.

REANNZ links universities and Crown Research Institutes within New Zealand via One NZ (Vodafone) fibre-optic cable and Vocus Communications, at speeds up to 100 gigabits per second.

The numbers involved, coupled with increasing sophistication of personal applications, mean that managing demand and maintaining performance require the use of a hybrid Ethernet and Internet Protocol (IP) network architecture.

[citation needed] The research community, driven by the development of various e-science grids, has developed large-scale applications that will individually use high amounts of bandwidth and can in some cases also have strict demands on the network that may require defined resources allocated temporarily to meet performance demands.