43 representatives of 26 organizations (including 20 NRENs) from 20 countries participated in the annual FileSender meeting at TNC25 in Brighton, UK, held on June 11, 2025. Here, FileSender community enthusiasts – service providers, users and developers – met to exchange their experiences, share expectations and discuss priorities for the future. This year’s meeting proved to be a highly engaging and interactive one, filled with numerous questions and insightful answers that brought out many issues and set the tone for a productive discussion.
FileSender aims to be a widely deployed service enabling anyone to easily and securely transfer files of any size from any person or machine to any other person or machine. FileSender explicitly targets mass usage and is built to service the 99% of users who would rather spend their time on other things than figuring out how to perform large file transfers.
The FileSender Board, comprising Jan Meijer of Sikt, the Norwegian NREN, Guido Aben of SUNET, the Swedish NREN, and Rogier Spoor of SURF, the Dutch NREN, provided an overview of FileSender and its main features for newcomers (with emphasis on simplicity and full control for users, browser-native and privacy by design), as well as introduced the team behind the project.
The 2025 update on deployments in the national R&E space was presented, emphasizing the opportunity to translate the FileSender interface for better support of national communities. Also, the audience was encouraged to share their use cases for FileSender from different countries (with different NRENs and connected organisations involved) across various domains, which could be transformed into detailed case studies and shared with the global FileSender community.
Key highlights included the visibility of FileSender deployments at the national level (including at the GÉANT community countries) vs EU level, FileSender service as part of the EOSC EU Node, and the current status of finances and contributor contracts.
We are grateful to AARNet (Australia), ACOnet (Austria), Arnes (Slovenia), Belnet (Belgium), CSC (Finland), DeiC (Denmark), GARR (Italy), HEAnet (Ireland), REANNZ (New Zealand), Switch (Switzerland) and to the German Cancer Research Center – 11 organisations in total – supporting FileSender financially with active contribution agreements:
Organisation
AARNet
ACOnet
Arnes
Belnet
CSC
DeiC
DKFZ (German Cancer Research Center)
GARR
HEAnet
REANNZ
Switch
Country
Australia
Austria
Slovenia
Belgium
Finland
Denmark
Germany
Italy
Ireland
New Zealand
Switzerland
World region
Asia-Pacific
Europe
Europe
Europe
Europe
Europe
Europe
Europe
Europe
Asia-Pacific
Europe
Level
Silver
Bronze
Bronze
Silver
Bronze
Bronze
Bronze
Bronze
Silver
Bronze
Silver
Annual amount
€10,000
€5,000
€5,000
€10,000
€5,000
€5,000
€5,000
€5,000
€10,000
€5,000
€10,000
Agreement signed
20 Feb 2023
27 Mar 2023
19 Aug 2024
2 May 2024
19 Dec 2023
11 Sep 2023
30 Sep 2024
12 Dec 2022
18 Jan 2023
22 Aug 2024
20 Oct 2022
Besides these, RNP (Brazil) provides a substantial in-kind contribution, having taken responsibility for implementing and maintaining the new user interface (UI) in version 3.0. SURF (the Netherlands) assists FileSender considerably with both financial backing and in-kind resources. All current Gold- and Silver-level contributors – AARNet, Belnet, HEAnet, RNP, SURF and Switch – benefit from their logos appearing in the FileSender banner as of version 3.0.
Additionally, various aspects of the FileSender collaborative effort were discussed at the meeting, including updates on version 3.0 development and its current deployments, the main challenges to ensure continuous development and long-term sustainability, regular FileSender security audits and robustness, the current roadmap, and the next steps.
Kenjiro Yamanaka of the National Institute of Informatics (NII), the Japanese NREN, made a very interesting presentation about the NII initiative to create a global network of interconnected FileSender installations. It aims to improve the speed of international file sharing over long distances, showing how FileSender servers around the world can work together to transfer files at high speed from the sender’s FileSender server to a FileSender server close to the receiver. NII plans a Global FileSender trial with locations in Japan, Europe and North America in October 2025, based on the FileSender 3.0 release candidate complemented with the NII code to support node addressing in the UI and server-to-server transfers using high-speed MMCFTP (Massively Multi-Connection File Transfer Protocol) protocol, developed by NII. The code has provisions to allow fallback to SCP or a RESTful API.
The FileSender Board is positive to this development and will work with NII to include its contribution in as an experimental feature.
The encouraging progress of FileSender, as an open source project, happens when individuals and organisations are willing to collaborate and to contribute their time and resources. Any FileSender user can join us and get involved in the FileSender development effort – we would love to see your participation and help! All contributions are always warmly welcomed, big and small. If you think the FileSender software is valuable and you want to support its continued development financially or in-kind, please let us know by sending an email directly to the FileSender Board.
