012.50 Central & Eastern Europe, Generally by Milan Sterba <sterba@vse.cs>
Internet networking in Central and Eastern Europe is most advanced in Poland, where a primary name server and more than 20 machines are actually connected to Internet. Czechoslovakia and Hungary are now running only experimental connections and a plan currently exists to connect Baltic republics to Internet over Nordunet. Report can be found on anonymous ftp on mcsun.eu.net.
A strong expansion of IP facilities in ECE countries is to be expected during 1992. Academic IP backbone projects are now becomming a reality in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. The process is slowed down by bad and expensive telecommunication infrastructure, lack of finances. The COCOM restriction rules do not seem to be a problem for those countries but the administrative procedures to obtain export licences are still very slow for certain types of material (IP routers, RICS machines, NetBlazers). Coordination in network strategies and common approach to the above mentioned problems is a necessity. A general mailing list for ECE countries international networking is central-euro-net@inria.fr.
ECE countries strongly need information and contacts to be able to quickly spread Internet services. Trip money for network worshops, conferences and coordination and task forces meetings is still a problem. Several initiatives try to tackle with this (NetSchool in Trieste, RIPE, EUnet and EARN support) National initiatives by DFN-WIN, INRIA France, ACONET Austria etc. tend to help in solving national and international infrastructure.
