Wednesday morning, I brought my bags down to the train station
and joined a stream of Dutch commuters. It is not unusual for people in Holland to live at one end of the country and work at the
other. I was going half-way across the country to Utrecht, a half-hour away.
The train ran parallel to one of the main Amsterdam canals,
lined with houseboats and barges, then past warehouses and windmills. Passing the suburb of Amstel and the sprawling IBM complex, we started picking up speed. Suddenly, we were in the
countryside, an elaborate system of canals crisscrossing the fields
and forming a series of little islands, connected by bridges and
sluices.
It was market day in Utrecht and, since I didn't have a hotel
reservation, I headed right into the middle of the town square to
look around for a place to stay. Spotting one, I avoided the temptation to stop at stands full of cheeses, herring, and baked goods and
got a room.
With a few hours to kill, I brought my laptop into a little cafe by
a canal, one of a half-dozen places crowded with tables of high-school and college kids sipping coffees and beers. At 2 P.M., I gathered my things and went into the shopping center complex
surrounding the train station to find Kees Neggers, co-managing director of
SURFnet, the Dutch academic and research network.
After seeing so many networks like EUnet in Amsterdam and
AARNet in Australia run with a couple of guys and a Sun, it was
certainly a change to see SURFnet occupying a whole floor of plush
offices. When I asked Kees how many people worked there, he said
only 20, but many of them were responsible for supervising subcontractors.
SURFnet is a company that is owned 49 percent by the Dutch
PTT and 51 percent by the SURF Foundation, a group started initially by the universities, but which has grown to include research
institutes, the research arms of corporations, and other institutions
of higher education such as teaching hospitals and vocational
schools.
To explain SURFnet, SURF, and the PTT, Kees went to the white
board and carefully drew the organizational structure, drawing my
attention to the legal status of all the parties and pointing out the
differences in Dutch law between the limited liability partnership,
the foundation, and the association.
As Kees continued his chalk talk, it occurred to me that he had
not said one word about the network itself. I knew that SURFnet
was born as a project of SURF in 1986, had become a real company
in 1989, and I even knew about things like the fact that it had a
capitalization of 3 million guilders (U.S. $1.6 million), and expenditures of NG 14 million per year, of which NG 10 million were cost
recovery services from users and 4 million was development paid
for by the government. What I didn't know was what the network
did.
Well, it turned out that SURFnet started by using the X.25 data
service from the PTT. After some long thinking and a big RFP,
Northern Telecom got the contract to install and manage a private
X.25 network based on 64 kbps links. This net was based on three
major hubs, with each leg of the triangle having two or three 64
kbps links. Another 16 sites were equipped with switches, each of
these having at least two lines into the network. Altogether, 413
sites had connections.
The network appeared to be your basic FOO over X.25 net.
Most of the services had SURF* names. SURFmail, for example,
was descrlbed in the annual report as "using the RFC-822 addressing mode as an intermediate step towards the international X.400
standard."
Recently, the network had begun the process towards a 2 Mbps
backbone. To quell any political problems, five sites were given 2
Mbps links and a "pilot" was run. Some lines ran straight IP, others
ran straight X.25, and some ran a multiplexed mess of the two.
Needless to say, the results of the pilot showed that running IP on a
line was more efficient than running IP on top of X.25. However,
with X.25 identified in many European countries as the "pathway to
OSI" it was important to conduct the pilot.
All this technical information I learned in a few minutes from
Kees and by leafing through the annual report. Very quickly,
though, we were back on the subjects of organizational charts, examining how his network management staff served as contract supervisors to monitor the subcontractors that were doing network
management.
We moved on from SURFnet to pan-European politics, an area
in which Kees is an extremely active player. His first foray was as
the EARN representative for his country. When RARE was formed,
SURF was named as the Dutch national member, and Kees was
named SURF's representation to the RARE Council of Administration (CoA).
RARE, the Réseaux Associés pour la Recherche Européenne, was
started in 1986 to promote the use of networks based on open systems solutions, read "OSI." This was to be sharply contrasted to
EARN, IBM's proprietary protocol, association, and network, foisted
upon unknowing European countries as part of an alleged plot to
dominate the market. Well, maybe not quite that sharply contrasted, but it would not do to underestimate the fury of this particular religious war.
At that time, only the U.K. really had a national network. Many
people assumed that OSI would be the basis for networking and
that the PTTs would provide the infrastructure on which OSI would
run. That infrastructure would be a commercial offering, universally available, and available soon.
The focus on the PTT as the service provider led to the assumption of a single national network, and thus RARE is made up of one
member per country. There are also various associate members, international members, and liaison organizations, but the basic governance of the organization is by the Council of Administration
which has one seat per country.
There is another element of RARE that is worth noting. It gets
money from two sources: contributions from member countries and
from the European Commission. The European Commission component is strong enough that they wield considerable clout on
RARE decisions.
Most of the linkage between RARE and the Commission has
been through the
COSINE
project. (Every acronym must be pronounceable and preferably have a double meaning of some sort,
however inane. In the case of COSINE, the expansion yields Cooperation for OSI Networking in Europe.)
COSINE was started in 1986 by another group called Eureka, a
research fund subscribed to by a group of countries toughly equivalent to the RARE membership or the European Free Trade Association. The COSINE project of Eureka was handed over to the
European Commission to act as project coordinator and they, in
turn, picked RARE as the secretariat.
What all this meant was that Eureka kicked in some money, the
Commission kicked in some more, and a fraction of that money
flowed downhill to RARE. Eventually, so the theory went, money
would flow down even further into a series of market-pull activities
that would prepare and stimulate OSI in Europe.
Much of the research funded by the Commission was in the area
of "pre-standardization research." Pre-standardization was the
process of preparing a bunch of documents that are then used as
input to the standards process. In the case of COSINE, this meant
establishing the subset of OSI that would best fit the special needs
of Europe.
The functional profiles of OSI were prepared by a series of
working groups. Every country got a member. The chair could invite four "experts," sort of a standards patronage position. The EC
paid for the travel expenses of each delegate, kicked in for the cost
of donuts at the meetings, and took care of the RARE secretariat.
Paying people to go to meetings in fine places has the sure result
of generating a large demand for meetings. The specification process dragged on as people tried to define which portions of OSI
would be used in Europe. The assumption was that when those
profiles were developed, the lure of the common European market
would be enough to attract vendors like flies to a water buffalo.
Vendors and researchers took one of two approaches. A few
went ahead and just implemented the portions of OSI that made
sense in a product. ISODE was a perfect example of this. Most just
went ahead and sold TCP/IP products.
After a couple of years of this process, a set of 10 very thick,
very blue volumes of COSINE specifications were issued. These 10
blue books were summarized in a red book, which in turn was summarized in an orange executive overview. I suspect quite a few corporations took that orange distillation and concentrated it yet
further until senior management was hearing summaries such as
"this stuff is great, trust us."
Once the specifications were complete, RARE developed a COSINE implementation plan. In January 1990, this implementation
plan was signed as a contract between the Commission and RARE.
The RARE COSINE Project Management Unit (PMU) became a reality.
COSINE was designed as a three-year plan with a budget of
ECU 30 million (U.S. $36.9 million). Most of that money, over ECU
12 million, went into IXI, the International X.25 Infrastructure (IXI).
A large chunk, ECU 6 million, went into the PMU.
IXI is an international X.25 network for researchers. Countries
like Greece, Yugoslavia, Ireland, and Portugal all use IXI as their
main path into the European mainland. Even the U.K., for some
strange reason, links itself into the continent with IXI.
The network is simply a star configuration of a set of 64 kbps
lines that link national X.25 networks. Typically, a private, virtual
X.25 network is built on top of the PTT's own offering. There are
actually two stars, one in Amsterdam and one in Bern. Two 64 kbps
links connect the stars, and each country gets one 64 kbps link into
one of the hubs.
Except for the U.K., that is. The U.K. is big enough that it really
needs two 64 kbps links into Amsterdam. Of course, that means
that you're pumping 128 kbps of data into a 64 kbps network, but
that's another story.
In a classic example of how networks will grab whatever resources they can, much of the IXI traffic consists of setting up a
virtual circuit to NIKHEF, which operates a gateway from IXI into
the Internet. While running TCP/IP on top of X.25 is not the most
efficient implementation in the world, when that's your only choice,
it works fine.
The theory behind IXI, and all COSINE projects, was to stimulate the market with the initial implementation. At the end of the
three-year trial, some commercial entity would see the inherent
profitability of the enterprise and step forward boldly with an aggressive bid to take the project over as a going concern.
At the end of 1992, IXI would terminate, and there had not yet
been a clamor for rights to run the service commercially. Unless, of
course, there might be some Commission money in it. This had occurred to a few people, and RARE was about to start lobbying for
an Operational Unit.
Meanwhile, a second force reared its ugly head: people needed
networks to do their jobs. Most of those national networks had
started carrying large amounts of TCP/IP traffic, and many RARE
members had to weigh the relative merits of keeping a network running against the desire to attract Commission money.
RIPE, of course, was the answer at first. RARE got in the act
with the EBONE proposal, in which Kees took a leading role, along
with groups like EUnet and NORDUnet. EBONE took the informal
cooperation from 1991 and turned it into a more structured consortium for 1992.
Since the meeting I had attended in November at the Amsterdam Zoo, the EBONE proposal had taken shape. Two key groups,
CERN and IBM, had decided not to sign the formal memorandum
of understanding, but would still cooperate in the project.
Once the decisions to join (and how much to contribute) were
made, the resources were turned over to an EBONE Action Team
(EAT) to turn money, routers, people, and lines into a reasonable
network.
A 512 kbps backbone had been decided upon between Stockholm, London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and CERN. Three links to
the U.S. were available, with two operating at 512 kbps and a T1
line from CERN (the EASInet IBM line). In some cases, money had
been used to upgrade existing facilities. In others, existing resources
were simply put into the EBONE pool.
The distinction was important because at the end of 1992, according to the Memorandum of Understanding that chartered
EBONE, the group would disband and all resources would revert to
the owners (except for the money of course, which is kind of hard to
give back once you've spent it). No formal company existed and
there was no dedicated EBONE manager.
At the end of 1992, the official plan was to have RARE start an
Operational Unit. The Operational Unit would provide a home for
things like EBONE and maybe even projects like IXI. The Operational Unit would be set up with capital from RARE members (and
presumably some nice research grants from the Commission to keep
it going). Officially, the Unit would operate as a separate organization, but with RARE members contributing the capital, RARE members would get the shares, and presumably, RARE would have some
influence in how those shares got used.
Setting up the Operational Unit and operating it as a more formal replacement for EBONE could be looked at one of two ways.
On the one hand, it could be the badly-needed professional operation that would run the long-heralded pan-European infrastructure.
A few cynics looked at the Operational Unit in another way, seeing
a power grab that could hurt existing operations such as EUnet.
The official raison d'être for the Operational Unit was contained
in a report Kees handed me entitled "Final Report of the RARE Task
Force on the Establishment of the Operational Unit for the Supply of
Network and Information Services to the R&D Community" with a
bright yellow cover and attractive GBC binding.
This report was a marvel of detail, containing a complete business plan for the Operational Unit with a cash flow analysis through
1996, job descriptions for OpUnit officers, and an annex of commonly asked questions and answers, my favorite being "Why are
data networks important for Europe?"
This report explained how a professionally managed backbone
was key for Europe. In fact, it was assumed that you needed to
provide this capability through a single organization, sort of the
way that the NSFNET had provided a single backbone service in the
U.S.
The flaw in this analogy was that the NSFNET had not provided
the single backbone service in the United States or for the Internet.
The backbone was, as soon as multiple networks came into being, a
combination of resources.
The NSFNET, for example, had to cooperate with the MILNET,
the replacement for the ARPANET. NASA already had NSI, Energy
had ESnet, and corporations had their own networks. A single
backbone provider was certainly not the only way to structure European networking.
As I was looking through the business plan for the OpUnit, Kees
handed me another document, a report from the European Engineering Planning Group, which in turn had been set up by the
RARE Council of Administration.
The EEPG document had a grand plan for networking in
Europe. Kees was a key member of the EEPG. The EEPG outlined
a scheme in which research networking in Europe would need, to be
a success, four bodies. An Operational Unit was one of them. A
networking association (RARE), a policy body (people with money),
and a "consultative networking forum" were the other three bodies.
Of course, there were other networking associations in Europe,
but RARE had been doing a pretty good job of setting up agreements. RIPE had become a RARE activity, a status certainly placing
it lower in the hierarchy than an association.
That left EARN. RARE had been engineering an acquisition and
merger of EARN, proposing that the two groups form as a way of
increasing their mutual power. Like a giant game of RISK, with
Europe under control, RARE was taking an active role in the international scene, participating in places like the Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research Networking (CCIRN) and
co-founding the Internet Society.
This wasn't everything, either. I learned that RARE had helped
form the European Workshop on Open Systems (EWOS) which
would help set up European OSI profiles. RARE was also part of
the European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI), the official pan-European telecommunications standards body which was
worrying about issues like ISDN or 2 Mbps X.25 networks and had
joined the European Council of Telecommunications User Associations (ECTUA).
I left Kees' office with my head swimming. He had let me know
that he had to leave by 4:06. I had thought the departure time was a
bit odd, but it occurred to me that Kees was in the shopping center
of which the train station was a part and that he had probably
timed the walk down to the trains. Just in case he felt like getting a
jump on things, I left at 4:03.
Walking back to town, to keep warm, I went through all the new
acronyms I had learned, hoping that repeating them would generate
enough hot air to counteract the chill. Needing a cup of coffee and
a blank piece of paper to sort everything out, I ducked in out of the
cold into a little corner coffee shop with windows all fogged up a
definitely counterculture clientele.
Rubbing my hands to warm up, I stepped up to the counter to
order.
"Do you have a menu?" I asked the attendant who ambled over
from a table where he was playing chess.
He pointed down on the glass. I quickly realized that I was at
the wrong counter. This menu specialized in regional specialties.
The left hand side featured different kinds of hashish, ranging from
your basic Lebanese to your more exotic Nepalese. The 10 and 25
guilder columns contained how many grams (or portions of grams)
you got for your money. The right hand side of the menu was devoted to fine marijuanas, featuring orange bud, sinsemilla, and the
like.
Not needing to confuse myself even further, I went down the
steep spiral stairs to the coffee bar in the basement. There, amidst
the kids rolling joints, the din of pinball, and the very loud music, I
read through the stack of documents I had collected that day.