12.30 Germany by Klaus Ullmann <ullmann@dfn.dbp.de>
Service Provision for the Research Community in Germany
In Germany the research community is organized on a federal basis, which means that no central funding body for networking exists. As there are nolonger any regulatory barriers for service provision from the national PTT there is more than one organisation in the research network field. The biggest one is the DFN-Verein, an association of 250 institutional members(all German universities as well as research labs and various industries).Through this organisation the federal ministry for research and technologyhas funded (amongst other projects) the installation of a national connectivity network with 9.6 kbps, 64 kbps and 2 Mbps access points. A data volume of about 120 GByte per month is being transferred; charges for the access points are based on the capacities used and on a fixed price per access point. On the basis of this connectivity network and to a lesser degree through other means (i.e. leased lines, public X.25 network and ISDN service) the DFN-association, the German branch of EUNET and the Karlsruhe-based XLINK group provide a couple of services, namely OSI-, EARN- and IP-services (DFN) and IP service (EUNET, XLINK). All these services provide (through different means) international connectivity as well.
In future editions of the ISOC newsletter these services will be describedin more detail.
