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* * A bi-monthly electronic news bulletin
* * reporting on the activities of DANTE,
* the company that organises international
* network services for the European
THE WORKS OF D A N T E research community.
No.14, April 1996 Editor: Josefien Bersee
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TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIVITY
Connectivity between EuropaNET and the US is continuously being
upgraded. Currently 12 T1's (18 Mbps) and one E1 (2 Mbps), a total
of 20 Mbps, are in place. The latest increase in capacity was
organised by DANTE on behalf of UKERNA and SWITCH and we have had
further enquiries about increasing the connected capacity. With the
purchase of each incremental circuit DANTE and its customers can
benefit from greater economies of scale.
The use of T1's as a building block to increasing capacity is
attractive since it allows diversity of routing and single failures
do not have disastrous consequences. However there are major
developments underway in European research networking as a result of
national initiatives complemented by the TEN-34 project and the clear
need is for European and north American researchers to interconnect
at least 45 Mbps and preferably higher speeds.
There is however a major disincentive to this in the lack of US co-
funding of the necessary infrastructure. On a conservative estimate
European researchers pay at least 80% of the cost of the connectivity
with their North American counterparts. There is some co-funded
capacity but this organised to connect to specific national research
networks within Europe. In view of the relatively balanced traffic
loads between the European research Internet and the North American
Internet this state of affairs is inequitable. DANTE, along with a
number of others, is pressing for a fairer way of sharing costs
between Europe and North America.
An approach whereby national research networks collaborate in the
establishment of transatlantic connectivity could provide a solution
for the inequities that currently exist. By offering US researchers
access to a 'greater' European research Internet the case for a
better balance in transatlantic funding would be strengthened.
TEN-34: THE WORK HAS STARTED
The technical work for TEN-34, the project to implement a high speed
pan-European network infrastructure for research with 50% co-funding
by the EC, has taken off seriously now. All national networks in the
Consortium have now signed the contract and by adding its signature
the EC will formally conclude the contract.
The project plan envisages the setting up of two subnetworks (one by
Unisource and the other by BT, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and
Telecom Italia), which are interconnected, while networks in
countries outside these two groups will connect to either of the two.
DANTE, as coordinating partner in the TEN-34 consortium, is
addressing the many technical and organisational issues that arise in
this huge, multi-party project.
NEWSFLOW: WHAT'S NEW?
During the last EuropaNET APM (Access Port Managers) meeting the
distribution of NEWS over EuropaNET was discussed. Because on the one
hand DANTE received several requests for NEWS distribution and on
the other hand the way NEWS is currently distributed is
unsatisfactory from some networks' point of view and could be
optimised by reducing the number of hops.
At the moment some National Research Networks with a topological
'advantage' within EuropaNET supply multiple feeds. Because of the
rapid growth of the NEWS traffic load (400% per year!) they want to
be compensated in the future for bandwidth/machine capacity/manpower
spent. One possibility would be for DANTE to provide a NEWS service,
co-operating with its partners, another option would be to
subcontract a NEWS service. At the moment DANTE is investigating as
the favoured option a co-operative model to find a fair balance in
costs and benefits. A mailing list has been set up for partners
interested in co-ordination of the European NEWS flow.
A POLICY PERSPECTIVE ON NETWORKING
In Europe, political issues probably play a more substantial role in
networking than technology does. How else to explain the relatively
poor state of the European Internet (compared to the US)? In some
instances policy issues have been the main obstacles to progress,
e.g. in the case of the national telecoms monopolies, or the lack of
co-funding of US-European connectivity by American telecom operators.
While DANTE's mandate is in principle straightforward, daily practice
shows that there are many policy issues that interfere and impede
progress. In addition to its technical work DANTE is trying to deal
with these policy issues as well.
In a new 'policy perspectives' section on the WWW server we address
some the issues that European research networking has to tackle - as
well as making suggestions on how they could be addressed to speed up
the establishment of a high quality network infrastructure for
European researchers. URL: http://www.dante.net/policy.html.
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