NORDUnet: ready for collaboration

Peter Villemoes
General Manager
NORDUnet
E-mail: peter.villemoes@nordu.net

NORDUNET was organized to provide communication for reseaech and educational institutions in Nordic Countries. It is a result of collaboration of Nordic countries in the beginning of 1980s.

Purpose

To operate an international network to give services to national networks in the Nordic countries and to international networks of interest to the company and its shareholders.

NORDUnet A/S Shareholders

• UNI-C, Denmark
• Finnish Ministry of Education
• University of Iceland
• UNINETT A/S, Norway
• Agency for Higher Education, Sweden

Philosophy: to allow all networks of the Nordic countries to meet in backbone in Stockholm and to have then connectivity to Europe and US networks. So, we have to provide connectivity for all Internet in the world. The main lines are 1-4 Mbps.

Addressing to the theme of today's workshop, we should say that several Nordic countries are neighbors of Russia and other countries of fSU. So,

1. We are your neighbours.
2. We want and have to provide for our scientists connection to your scientists and I hope you have similar demands. So, we have common interests.
3. What we can do? We can offer you a total connectivity to all Nordic countries. We can also offer you collaboration and technical assistance in network building.

   Certainly, we can discuss with you a problems of backbone we heard of this morning because we have had identical discussion both in the countries and the central office. There are also 6 or 8 commercial networks meet with NORDUnet in Stockholm. And it works excellently in good harmony because it provides a connectivity for everyone but nobody controls anybody with open access.

4. What we require for collaboration? If we set up interconnection to networks, we are interested in connection our users to as many colleagues in Russia as possible. So we want to connect to, what we call, generally available networks, not to individual institutions in order to save our resources.

   Secondly, we have an experience that if you don't carefully regulate network connections and have too many links to too many places, then you have a network that cannot be managed. So if we are looking for a connection to Russia or to other state, this connection should be a part of overall plan.

5. The last item is on the problem we solved, although our solution is not a panacea. It is a problem of mixture of scientific and commercial traffic.

   In NORDUNET we say the network is set up to serve research that means that we give access to all possible networks. On the other hand, the network is not to set up to serve any commercial activity. So, we are ready to connect any commercial network, but we do not set up to transmit commercial traffic from commercial network through NORDUnet to other commercial networks. So, we cannot provide a connectivity for commercial networks.

6. We already are on the way to implement a connection from St.Petersburg to Helsinki with Mbit line and we are expecting a direct access through St.Petersburg to other networks in Russia including satellite lines.