Alexander Saban
Institute for Condensed Matter Physics
National Academy of Science of Ukraine
EARN Director for Ukraine
E-mail: saban@icmp.lviv.ua
Ladies and gentlemen, let me first thank the organizing committee for invitation to this Workshop, to this seminar and because most of the people here speak Russian and from Russia please let me the rest of talk to deliver in Russian.
I'll begin by saying that today in the Ukraine we have not a stable situation in the sphere of education and government bodies and agencies. Similar situation we have in few public organizations and movements.
Presently we have completed the first stage in network development. It was not a very advanced stage. The possibility in IP networking is quite moderate. What have we done and how have we done that?
The economic situation in the Ukraine is not favorable. And science and education suffers serious losses. You are probably acquainted with the situations when Universities do not have the money to pay bills for electricity and hot water. We need to stop this economic decline and one of the very important aspects in our life is accessibility to global information networks which is necessary to support science and education development.
When designing networks we have to think of its low price. And actually it leads to a necessity to include some governmental bodies into the network, because the Ministry of Communication has a different price list for commercial and governmental organizations. The most expensive part of the project is international channels of communication. And till now we manage to get them as a result of European international cooperation and this kind of cooperation is possible under the framework of CEENet, comparatively new network organization in Eastern Europe also through cooperation under the auspices of RIPE, RARE who render technical assistance to us. And I should mention the program for the development of the United Nations. Also we are provided international access through line between Lviv and Warsaw financed mainly through NASK, network in Poland, and other participations of ACOnet, network from Austria.
Now about organizational aspects. Primarily we had no centralized single approach in forming network, nor centralized financing. It was started with an initiative of several organizations and agencies. Now this kind of cooperation has been achieved, I mean first of all with the governmental Committee on Science and Technology (CST) and besides we have established links with the Ministry of Communication. The general principle is that the organization which is responsible for or may help in forming network is invited into cooperation. So I enlist agencies and organizations participating in the project, this is CST of Ukraine, the Academy of Science, "Internet for Ukraine", a project of the United Nations, the Soros Foundations, also Universities participating in forming networks. Then, the United States Congress of Resource Service, UNESCO, American Physical Society. We would like to avoid building of great number of smaller networks which normally are rivals of each other and we are trying to combine all sponsors and all participating agencies and institutions.
Before I finish I'd like to show you the list of institutions who are using networks. We have an access to Warsaw through Lviv and this is list Lviv institutions as well as institutions in other cities. Kiev has certainly more of them as well as Kharkov, Odessa and Donetsk. We are cooperating fruitfully with Byelorus. I mean they are setting their international mail through our networks, so we are rendering them this kind of service.
We can think about practical steps, equipment which will make possible for us to provide digital access to international networks. The line from Lviv to Warsaw would be replaced by a satellite channel and due to support of the United Nations (I mean "Internet for Ukraine" project) it will provide communications with 256 Kbps to Poland.
My colleagues will speak after me, academician Petrov, for instance, I would like to inform you that he personally and his institute are dealing with such important matter as informational distributed database. Ukrainian databases I'm sure will find consumers not only in Ukraine, but in the whole of the world. Professor Vinitsky devoted most of his career to the communication problems, he is one of the pioneers in this aspect in Ukraine, and Alexander Tokar is representing the State Committee for Science and Technology here. So thank you for your attention.