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- 012.60 Baltic States
- by Mats Brunell *
- <Mats.Brunell@sics.se>
-
-
- The former Baltic Soviet Union states are now independent
- countries. Internally a lot of problems exist. The
- infrastructures needs improvement, especially in
- telecommunications. Several activities have started to support
- these efforts from UN/UNESCO and various national groups. A
- particular interest has been expresed by the Nordic countries to
- support the Baltic countries.
-
- Swedish Telecomm has made agreements to help build new
- telecommunications infrastructures in Estonia and Latvia. This
- effort plans to open a radio-link from Helsinki to Tallinn to
- Tartuu to Riga for general phone services at 34 Mbps. A longer
- term plan is to improve infrastructure by installing fiber and
- new digital switching capabilities. Lithuania is said to have
- collaborations with US and Danish carriers.
-
- Generally equipment for networking has been very scarce. A year
- ago, all that existed was a mix of PCs and IBM and VAX/PDP11
- look-alikes in small numbers. Several donations has been made of
- modern equipment, and more are planned by individuals,
- universities and companies.
-
- Dial-up based UUCP capabilities have been used for a few years.
- The poor telecommunications infrastructure makes international
- dial-up connections hard. Tallinn in Estonia has acted as an
- intermediate hub for international traffic via Finland, supported
- by Finnish EuroOpen and NORDUnet. UUCP based traffic is also
- routed from Latvia through RELCOM/Moscow to Finland.
-
- NORDUNET & NORDUnet has made an application to the Nordic Council
- of Ministers to help establishing networking services to the R&D
- sector in the Baltic countries. The application is pending a
- decision in May -92. UNESCO has funded a project called Baltbone
- to interconnect the three Baltic countries.
-
- In Estonia, two new links has been established from Tallinn resp
- Tartu to Stockholm/KTH/NORDUnet. The links are 64 kbps satellite
- connections supported by US and Swedish funds. The services will
- be Internet based. Router equipment is still lacking, but
- hopefully services will be started shortly. An agreement has
- been made between NORDUnet and the Estonia platform ESTNET, with
- membership from the major Universities. An application to
- register the Estonian top-level domain .EE has been made to the
- NIC. Primary DNS-service is provided by KTH in Sweden. There is
- also a link planned in between Helsinki and Tallinn supported by
- the Finnish Ministry of Education.
-
-
- In Lithuania, an X.400/X.25 9600 bps connection is established
- from Vilnius/Academy of Sciences to Norway. This connection is
- supported by the Norwegian government. An interim agreement has
- been made with NORDUnet to relay email to/from Internet. An
- application is about to be submitted to register the Lithuanian
- top-level domain .LT. DNS service support will be made from
- Norway/UNINETT. There are plans for full Internet services in
- the future. A link is planned from Lithuania to Moscow to
- establish EARN connectivity.
-
- Lativa has formed a group to support the formation of a joint
- computer communications facility, the Communications Center of
- Latvian Universities (CCLU). CCLU is prepared and ready to take
- on the responsibility of administrating the IP network connection
- into Latvia. Formal application for the .LV top-domain is
- pending. Other networking interests has been expressed from the
- Academy of Sciences and RELCOM activities in Latvia.
-
- There is an open distribution list, NORDBALT@searn.sunet.se, for
- discussions of Baltic networking activities. To join, send mail
- to:
-
- LISTSERV@serarn.sunet.se
-
- In the body of the message, put the following text (substituting
- your real name and email addresses in the template):
-
- add nordbalt emailaddress realname
-
-
- * Swedish Institute of Computer Science
-