History of Research Networking
The Early Days of European Research Networking
The liberalisation of European telecommunications markets was a gradual process. There was always some very limited competition in regional markets within the Nordic region, but, for most of Europe, telecommunications was managed by the Postal Monopoly. The first changes came when the management of telecommunications was separated from that of the postal service. This did little for competition, but at least focussed the businesses more on the provision of service. The first really competitive national telecommunications market was in the UK. By 1983, there was a real competitive market for telecommunications. As a result, the UK academic network (JANET) was one of the early innovators in Research Networking. Other countries, seeing the benefits of liberalisation in the UK followed suit. The national markets for telecommunications gradually became more competitive and National Research networks took advantage of this liberalisation.
The pan-European Dimension
Developments on a pan-European scale were much slower. This was partly due to the lack of a common organisation but also to the fact that the market for international telecommunications in Europe was limited and monopolistic. The national research networks got together in 1986 to found RARE (Réseaux Associés pour la Recherche Européenne). In 1987 a number of European countries, co-operatively with the European Commission established the COSINE initiative. Cosine had two objectives. The first objective was to establish a common pan-European infrastructure to connect the National Research and Education networks together. The second objective was to foster the implementation of Open Systems Interconnection hence the name COSINE (Co-operation for Open Systems Interconnection in Europe). The overall plan for COSINE was very ambitious. It consisted of the construction of a pan-European X25 network to interconnect National Research networks, together with a programme of OSI related developments, covering a broad range of areas from file transfer protocols (FTP), through the provision of gateways to OSI services, and the provision of information services to targetted user support. RARE was the contractor for this work and set up a separate Project Management Unit to carry out the work. Unfortunately, there was a significant time lag between the establishment of the goals of the COSINE project and the start of its implementation. In this time, the Internet, router-based networking technology and the associated suite of applications protocols started to have significant impact. The applications protocols were vendor independent, thus fulfilling one of the major goals of OSI. They were also, in general, simpler than the OSI protocols and had more practical implementations. The Internet networking technology, whilst less manageable than X25 was, however, much more ubiquitous. X25 implementations in Europe suffered badly from being country specific, thus portability of terminals and applications was a serious problem. In contrast IP was, relatively speaking, a “plug and play” technology.
The initial network built by the COSINE project, IXI (International X25 Infrastructure), achieved one of the goals of the project, namely to create a pan-European Infrastructure to interconnect the National Research Networks in Europe. It connected 18 countries together using for the most part 64Kbps leased circuits. It was, however not efficient at meeting the emerging demand for IP services. It was succeeded, in 1992, by the EuropaNET network which had the ability to support both X25 and IP protocols. It bridged the gap between the two potential networking solutions and allowed a migration from X25 to IP. EuropaNET was the principle achievement of the COSINE project. Whilst much of the OSI development work was abandoned, as users switched to the Internet protocol suite, EuropaNET represented the networking platform upon which successive generations of pan-European network have been built. EuropaNET was based on 2Mbps leased circuits. In comparison to IXI this was a major improvement. The COSINE project also achieved another result. It was responsible for creating DANTE.
COSINE had created an infrastructure, and it was recognised by those who were responsible for funding the project that if this infrastructure was to survive and develop, it was necessary to have a permanent organisation to continue to support and develop the network. As part of the project a working group was established to make proposals for the future organisation of European Research networking. This group produced a blueprint for the future organisation which was described in the report “Towards a Single European Infrastructure” .
