Some results of URAN workshopby Dmitry Galagan 1. URAN is now an Internet provider. Most activities are concentrated on the external channels (increasing their bandwidth). All regional centers and corresponding universities see URAN as an Internet provider, with the major goal to have good external connectivity. At present time the capacity of external link is 64K, with the plan to install additional satellite downstream link 256K (this should be done during this month). External channel is 98% congested (during day-time).
Three other regional centres (State University "Lvivska Politechnika" in Lviv, Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev, Internet Center of Ministry of Education in Kiev) are connected as well, but they do not utilize the available connections. Main reason - the price/quality ratio is not competitive comparing to commercial Internet providers. Representatives of regional centres say "for attracting users we need to demonstrate good Internet connectivity " Odessa regional center is not connected yet because of mistakes made when planning necessary equipment (purchased synchronous modems cannot work on big distances because of resistance problems). This problem hopefully will be solved soon (not later than the end of this year) by the acquisition of modems with necessary characteristics.
Expenses include salaries of staff, payments for backbone channels leased from UkrTelecom and payments for the external (64K) channel.
While NATO cannot pay salaries, the representatives of Tempus/Tacis said that it is quite possible that Tempus/Tacis can pay salaries to people working in Ukraine (in a framework of a corresponding projects, submitted to and approved by Tempus/Tacis).
Nowadays it seems that the cooperation inside the country hardly exists, while there are some activities on the international level in forms of projects, mostly aimed at getting financial resources (consumer position).
However, content issues have to be solved in projects, different from the present one financed by NATO. The present project was classified by NATO experts as one directed towards network infrastructure not content! A representative from Springer scientific publishing house (www.springer.de) has made a small presentation about the Springer electronic library services (Germany), as an example of possible content for URAN. Western experts have expressed an idea of making a report on behalf of each regional center: "How the regional centres can contribute to the content and the funding of URAN" with the deadline of 15 January 2000.
The working group, consisted from specialists of NTUU KPI and SU "Lvivska politechnika" (Lviv), has been entitled to work out this issue and formulate a clear document that will describe the accounting policy of URAN. |