Phare 1994 R&D Networking

In November 1994 the Phare 1994 R&D Networking Programme, with a budget of 4 MECU, was launched by the European Commission (DG-I). All eleven PHARE countries participated: Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The Programme has been managed by DANTE. PHARE 1994 R&D Networking has two elements:

 

1. National supply

In the national part of the project the aim was to deploy a set of basic hardware and software components required by the partner countries, such as routers, modems, workstations, and network management software. Albania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia benefitted from the national supply element of the project. The six other countries had already received funding for this purpose under the PHARE 1991 project. The equipment was tendered according to EC rules.

 

2. The international network service provision

The second element of the project was to extend and/or upgrade connectivity to the rest of the European research Internet. The following connection(s) had been realised as of December 1996:

Albania Tirana-Amsterdam 64kb/s satellite planned**
Bulgaria Sofia-Amsterdam 2x 64kb/s terrestrial planned**
Czech Rep. Prague-Amsterdam 512kb/s terrestrial operational
Czech Rep. Prague-Banska Bystrica 128kb/s* terrestrial operational
Estonia Tallin-Helsinki 256kb/s* terrestrial operational
Estonia Tallin-Riga 64kb/s* terrestrial operational
Hungary Budapest-Amsterdam 2Mb/s terrestrial operational
Latvia Riga-Tallin 64kb/s* terrestrial operational
Latvia Riga-Stockholm 384kb/s terrestrial operational
Lithuania Kaunas-Stockholm 512kb/s satellite operational
Poland Warsaw-Vienna 256kb/s* terrestrial operational
Poland Warsaw-Stockholm 2Mb/s* satellite operational
Romania Bucharest-Amsterda 64kb/s satellite terminated ***
Romania Bucharest-Budapest 64kb/s terrestrial operational
Romania Bucharest-Vienna 64kb/s* satellite operational
Slovakia Prague-Banska Bystrica 128kb/s* terrestrial operational
Slovenia Ljubljana-Amsterdam 2Mb/s terrestrial operational

(Circuits marked with (*) were established in a separate project, but funded or upgraded from the PHARE 94 budget.)

(Circuits marked with (**) will still be implemented; DANTE's original management contract has been extended beyong its original two year duration for this purpose.)

(The circuit marked with (***) was replaced in June 1996 with a 256 kb/s satellite circuit Bucharest - Stockholm which is funded independently of PHARE.)


PHARE 1994 R&D Networking has substantially improved the national and international networking facilities for researchers in the CEE region and facilitated integration between the research networking communities in western and central and eastern Europe.

An indication of the increased use of international networking in the PHARE countries is given in Fig.1 showing the numbers of registrations in the RIPE database of network addresses. Note that these figures include all registered addresses in each country and not just those using PHARE-funded links.)