__________________________________________________________________
 
                  * *      A bi-monthly electronic news bulletin
                 *   *     reporting on the activities of DANTE,
                *          the company that provides international
               *           network services for the European 
THE WORKS OF D A N T E     research community.

No.8, March 1995           Editor: Josefien Bersee
__________________________________________________________________

NEW EBONE-EUROPANET GATEWAY 

Since 1 February the fourth consecutive interconnect arrangement 
between EuropaNET and Ebone has been in operation. As the capacity of 
the previous gateway was insufficient, the new gateway has a capacity 
of 1 Mbps, and will shortly be upgraded to 1.5 Mbps. The cost is 
shared between Ebone and some of DANTE's customers. The current 
arrangement will cover the first 9 months of 1995.

At the same time DANTE regrets not to have been able so far to 
persuade EUnet to serialize their connection to EuropaNET. DANTE has 
been providing EUnet with a free 64 kbps access, but in practice much 
more capacity is used. Therefore DANTE asked EUnet to increase their 
connection rate accordingly and to serialize the connection in 
October last year. Unfortunately, DANTE can not indefinitely offer 
free and unlimited connectivity to some networks while charging 
others.

HIGH SPEED PROGRESS

While the EuroCAIRN study is now in the hands of the EuroCAIRN 
Committee DANTE has already taken the next step on the road to a high 
speed network for European research. DANTE submitted an outline 
proposal under a joint initiative as part of the EC Fourth Framework 
Programme of DG III F and DGXIII C to support the European 
interconnection of national research and university networks at 34-
155 Mbps. The initiative is an integral part of the existing Call for 
Proposals for the Information Technologies Programme (Esprit) and the 
Telematics Application Programme. DANTE will act as coordinating 
partner in a consortium together with a number of national research 
networks. A decision on which projects will be awarded funding will 
be made be made in the second half of 1995. Obviously DANTE is keen 
to get the opportunity to execute the implementation plan it has 
presented as part of the EuropCAIRN report.

DANTE AT CEBIT

DANTE is pleased to announce that, by courtesy of DFN, it will be 
present at CeBIT, the leading annual IT event in Hannover, Germany. 
DANTE was invited to share the DFN stand. DANTE will take the 
opportunity to increase visibility of its own activities and European 
research networking in general. In particular DANTE will spread the 
word on its 'high speed' activities so far. DFN and DANTE can be 
found in Hall 22, Stand D36. More information can be found on a 
special www page, URL: http://www.dante.net/CeBIT/CeBIT.html

VIRTUAL PROJECT LIBRARY 

DANTE is taking part in an EC Information Engineering Feasibility 
Project initiated by the French company Matra Marconi Space. The 
project is called Virtual Project Library and it sets out to create a 
mechanism which will enable project participants distributed all over 
Europe working together on a project to access, use and store project 
information over the network. This may sound very familiar to the 
networking community but in the commercial world the Internet is not 
yet the standard information medium, security being one major 
concern. DANTE was invited to join as partner to assess and advise on 
the pan-European networking options and limitations for creating such 
a mechanism. The kick-off meeting for the seven-month project took 
place in February.

NEW STAFF

Vincent Berkhout (NL) started work for DANTE on 16 January 1995. He 
will be working as Applications Engineer. Initially he will 
concentrate on directory issues. Vincent graduated as 'Telematics 
Engineer' at the Hogeschool Utrecht in 1992. For his final thesis he 
worked at SURFnet doing research on the technical infrastructure of 
X.500. After that he joined the post-graduate Technology Designer 
program at the University of Twente where he worked as a member of 
the Network Management discipline group.

________________________________________________________________

DANTE - Lockton House - Clarendon Road - Cambridge - CB2 2BH - UK

telephone             +44 1223 302992   
fax                   +44 1223 303005  

-- please note the new area code for Cambridge is (0)1223 -- 

E-mail                dante@dante.org.uk
                      S=dante; O=dante; P=dante; A=mailnet; C=fi
WWW server            http://www.dante.net/
Gopher server         gopher://gopher.dante.net/
Anonymous ftp         ftp://ftp.dante.net/pub/
_________________________________________________________________