EC backs research network

The European Commission has agreed to provide e80 million (Pounds 49.8 million) to help create a high-speed, high-capacity internet infrastructure to connect the national research and education networks of the European Union and other European countries.

The remainder for the Pounds 120 million project will come from the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) of the 15 EU member states and a further 13 countries participating in the network. The latter include the three Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Israel, Norway, Hungary, Iceland and Poland. Commission officials said the proposal to create such a research network had been considered by EU heads of government at the Lisbon summit in March and had been "warmly welcomed".

The new network will be fully operational by the beginning of 2001. The EC said it would connect and support "the most advanced research facilities in all member states of the EU and all associated states, providing access to the world's biggest multimedia network to more than 700,000 researchers".

The network will more specifically provide the foundation for advanced research towards the development of the future internet - the Internet2 - "pushing this technology to a wider-scale deployment".

Brussels said that by using the online linking system, "application projects such as the computational grids in biology or datagrids in high-energy physics will be able to involve all the best European research facilities".

The EU contribution to the network is larger than expected, reflecting the concern expressed by Erkki Liikanen, EU commissioner for the information society, over the widening gap between Europe and the United States and Japan in investing in internet research and development. Mr Liikanen has spoken frequently in recent months of the need for the EU to move quickly to build an e-commerce market with a parallel increase in spending on "research potential" at all levels. He said this week that "the upgrading of research and education networks in Europe is a major step towards the development of an innovative and entrepreneurial Europe and will speed up Europe's transformation into a genuine information society."