![[TEN-34 logo]](/ten-34/ten-34-small.GIF)
Editor: Cathrin.Stover@dante.org.uk
The planned configuration of TEN-34 has been completed on 24 March 1998 with the addition of the Portuguese national network RCCN via a 10 Mbps satellite link to Geneva. In April the 2 Mbps connection to NACSIS (National Centre for Science Information Systems) in Japan has been moved from the BT PoP in Amsterdam to the TEN-34 PoP in London.
Availability of TEN-34 remains high, with an average access port availability of 99.88% in March (excluding RCCN, with less than a full month). Traffic in the network continues to increase and bottlenecks start showing up, especially on the France-UK link, the NORDUnet access port and the FUDI-Unisource gateway in Frankfurt.
The EC has announced that the amount of money left to support an extension of TEN-34 beyond 31 July 1998 will be less than originally anticipated. This decision puts pressure on the TEN-34/Quantum transition timetable.
The Quantum proposal for EC support of the new network and related activities has been approved by the EC's Esprit and Telematics committees. Altogether 17 MECU will be made available by the EC towards the building and maintaining of the new network until the funds from the 5th Framework Programme will take over.
The Quantum Policy Committee agreed on 27 March to DANTE's proposal to prepare three alternative costed proposals, based on the tenders we received, for a further meeting at the end of May. The speed of decision making after that will depend on how clear-cut the choice of supplier(s) appears at that stage. There are still a large number of technical issues to be resolved with most of the potential suppliers. Delivery commitments, location of PoPs, provision of local access circuits (if necessary), and management of the managed bandwidth service are still major topics which continue to require discussion and negotiation.
ARNES, the Slovenian national network was connected to the Intercontinental-Service to the USA and the wider Internet on 8 April 1998. ARNES has joined the NRNs of the Czech Republic (CESnet), Greece (GRnet), Hungary (HUNGARNET) and Italy (GARR) which have been using DANTE's Intercontinental-Service since it became available in November 1997.
The Transatlantic line has filled up rapidly and packet loss peaks at 1200 pps during the busiest hours of the working day. DANTE is currently working with Teleglobe and Deutsche Telekom on the implementation of an upgrade of the US-Service to 45Mbps.
On Tuesday 7 April UKERNA was connected to the TEN-34 Mbone pilot, thus completing the migration. We can now provide a resilient multicast backbone on TEN-34, the first of its kind in Europe. This achievement resolves the problem of multiple Mbone feeds on the NRNs access lines.
More information on the new European Mbone topology can be found here . There is also a monitoring page which is updated periodically and shows the status of our mrouteds deployed across the network. This page can be found at http://www.dante.net/~nmc/mbone.
The analysis focuses on the following countries: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. Contacts with Telecom Operators and Research Networks and Institutes in the region have been established and information on the costs and benefits of direct connectivity has been gathered. A questionnaire, evaluating actual and potential demand, will be sent around user groups in Europe who are currently undertaking collaborative projects with research organisations in the Asia Pacific Area in the beginning of May.
![[TF-TEN logo]](/ten-34/tf-ten/tf-ten.GIF)
![[EuroCERT logo]](/pubs/EuroCERT.GIF)
EuroCERT, the European Incident Response Coordination Service, operated under a contract between TERENA and the DANTE/UKERNA partnership has been in operation since 1 May 1997. From May 1998 onwards, UKERNA will provide an Incident Coordination Service, with DANTE retaining a presence in the project, with the prospect of a more active role at a later stage.
After three years with DANTE, Nick Stevenson left DANTE at the end of March 1998.
Christoph Jahn (DE) joined DANTE on 20 April for six-months work experience. Christoph will work on internal projects related to systems administration and databases.
Jan Novak (CZ) will join DANTE on 1 May. Jan currently works for Aliatel, a new telecommunications operator, in Prague. He will be working for DANTE in network development and will contribute to the ongoing projects such as the Mbone migration, QoS issues and network planning.
Peter Gietz (DE) will also start with DANTE on 1 May. Peter used to work for the German National Research Network (DFN) at the University of Tuebingen. With DANTE Peter will be working in applications, responsible for directory indexing and LDAP deployment.
DANTE is offering a challenging job opportunity as Systems Administrator. For further information, please visit our jobs' page.