SEEREN2 - An Overview

The second generation of the South East European Research and Education Networking project (SEEREN2) intends to further ease the Digital Divide that still separates most of the south-east European countries from the rest of the continent. Besides providing connectivity as a direct benefit of the project, it is also acting as a catalyst for developing the research and education networks within the beneficiary countries, and has demonstrated the value of collaboration.

SEEREN2 is making leading-edge technologies and services available to the entire research and education community in southeast Europe. The central element of this approach is the south-east European research and education backbone network. The network will be substantially enhanced in its performance by comparison with its predecessor.

More significantly, however, it will seek to consolidate networking and grid infrastructures, into an eInfrastructure for south-east Europe, which will be fully integrated with the pan-European initiatives (GÉANT and EGEE). The SEEGRID initiative in particular will make use of SEEREN’s infrastructure in order to further this objective.

SEEREN2 is led by GRNET (the Greek NREN), partnered by DANTE, TERENA, NIIF (Hungary), RoEduNet (Romania), ISTF (Bulgaria), AMREJ and UoM/MREN (Serbia and Montenegro), MARNET (Macedonia), ASA/INIMA (Albania) and BIHARNET (Bosnia and Herzegovina).

The first generation of SEEREN successfully established connectivity for the NRENs in the countries in South East Europe that were not already connected:

• Albania
• Bosnia-Herzegovina
• Bulgaria
• Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
• Serbia and Montenegro.

The SEEREN infrastructure provided connections at between 2 and 155Mbps for the beneficiary NRENs, both directly between NRENs and with GÉANT. Its success in promoting research and education networking in the region is clearly demonstrated by the fact that in addition to their connection to SEEREN2, the Bulgarian NREN ISTF is now also directly connected to GÉANT.

The first two dark fibre links have been established recently: AMRES, the Serbian NREN, has established a 1Gbps connection to HUNGARNET, while Bosnia-Herzegovina has a new cross-border dark fibre link between a neutral aggregation point within the country and the closest SEEREN2 node in Belgrade.

The first SEEREN network was formally inaugurated in January 2004, and remained in service to the end of 2004. SEEREN technical training workshops were held to transfer technical skills, and to share best practice and experiences between the participants. The project was funded by the EC’s IST programme.