Title: David Williams, CERN
1 Outcomes and follow-up
- David Williams, CERN
- Reporting on SERENATE Final Workshop
- Bad Nauheim, 16 June 2003
- For SCIC, concentrating on Digital Divide inside
Europe
2The acronym
- SERENATE Study into European Research and
Education Networking as Targeted by eEurope - Funded as an EC project FP5
- Looking at the strategic needs, say up to 5 years
ahead - NOT about making detailed plans
3Who are the partners?
- Academia Europaea
- Centre for Tele-informatics (CTI), Technical
University of Denmark - DANTE
- European Science Foundation
- TERENA (coordinating partner)
- with considerable involvement of the NRENs, and
hopefully of other actors, including end-users
and industry
4Steering Committee
- Bonac - ARNES - chairs geographic break-out
group - Butterworth - AE chairs research users
- Davies - DANTE chairs technical
- Jaume - RENATER - chairs other users
- Liello - chair NREN Consortium
- Mayer - ESF
- Skouby - CTI chairs economics
- Vietsch - TERENA
- Williams
5Route to more information?
- http//www.serenate.org
- Public pages
- Also working areas for each work package
- mailtoinfo_at_serenate.org
6Structure and Timescales
7The EU project
- Runs from 1 May 2002 for 15 months, so until 31
July 2003 now being extended to 31 December
2003 - Comprises 14 areas of work, of which 5 workshops
- Initial workshop (17-18 Sept 2002)
- Operators views on infrastructure status and
evolution (8 Nov 2002, Amsterdam) - User needs and priorities (17-19 Jan 2003,
Montpellier) - Possible models for the future (4-5 Feb 2003,
Noordwijkerhout) - Final workshop (June 16-17 2003, Bad Nauheim)
- plus various studies and report writing
8Final workshop
9Some overall impressions
- Interesting but still lots to do
- We have consensus on the general directions,
but.. - Structural funds
- Accession Countries are in the process of
defining what they wish to use the Structural
Funds to invest in. - We had better help them to insist that some of
this is spent on RE network connectivity! - Strong personal opinion will see strong growth
in data volumes not just grids PCs connected
via GE will be able to source and sink lots of
data - Costs (DD slide ?)
10(No Transcript)
11Key first next step
- Write a good SERENATE Report
- Concise
- Clear
- Recommendations that can be acted on
- And especially a good Executive Summary
- Since many people will only read that
12EUROPESDIGITAL DIVIDE
- We are convinced that Europe does have a rather
serious internal Digital Divide ? -
13How can we be so sure?
- ON AVERAGE the 10 accession countries have NRENs
with 4-6 times less backbone capacity than NRENs
in the EU-15 countries - If we look at the NRENs in the EU-15 and compare
their networks with those of the next band of
countries (beyond the EU-25 plus BG plus RO plus
TR) then we see that ON AVERAGE the next band
have 20-30 times less capacity than the EU-15 - In the most extreme case, Bosnia-Herzegovina has
5,000 times less capacity than each of the four
most advanced countries (soon to be joined by
several more). - And Albania de facto does not yet have a research
network
14NREN Core Network Size (Mbps-km)
100M
Logarithmic Scale
Leading
Nl
10M
Fi
Cz
Advanced
Hu
Es
1M
Ch
In Transition
It
Pl
Gr
100k
Ir
Lagging
10k
Ro
1k
Ukr
100
15Tackling the DD will not be easy
- The best tell-tale indicator for DD problems is
excessively high pricing for connectivity - The fundamental cause is lack of competition,
which in many cases is due either to an
out-of-date regulatory regime, or to the lack of
political will to implement the (legislated)
changes. Especially this latter situation can be
extremely frustrating for the NREN involved - However lack of competition can sometimes be due
to essentially economic factors alone.
Infrastructure operators wish to make a profit in
some reasonable period, and look to invest in
locations where they think that there is a strong
market. We have seen evidence of reluctance to
invest in fibre infrastructure both in small(ish)
peripheral countries without strong high-tech
industry, but also in remote regions of the most
prosperous European countries.
16Actions required
- The Digital Divide inside Europe must be better
measured and monitored - Availability price of transmission fibre
infrastructure (EU tracking) - What the NRENs are doing with it (TERENA
compendium) - Performance as seen by end-users (SLAC/ICTP
efforts) - A political discussion is needed concerning what
we mean by Europe in this context - This appears to us to be the responsibility of
the EC - In the absence of progress towards competitive
transmission costs, the national, regional or
local governments concerned (or the EU) should
take action to stimulate open access (and hence
competitive) ducting and fibre supply. - The EC should consider whether the regulatory
regime should be adapted to ensure wide access to
fibre infrastructure at cost-based pricing.
1723 - 24 October 2003, Trieste, Italy http//www.e
jds.org/meeting2003/
18A mega-conference UN/ITU organised. Like the
Johannesburg meeting on AIDS, Kyoto on climate,
etc. Looking at Digital Divide issues. 10-12
December 2003, Geneva, Switzerland http//www.itu
.int/WSIS
19An event just prior to WSIS, concentrating on the
Role of Science in the Information Society 8-9
December 2003, Geneva, Switzerland http//www.cer
n.ch/RSIS/