Europe has lagged behind the USA in terms of telecommunications technology. Liberalisation gives Europe the opportunity to close the gap. It is important that European research networkers emulate the lessons learned by their US counterparts by contributing to the advance of technology, but also see the European dimension and benefit of such a contribution. A European superhighway based on European fibre-optics but US technology is not an achievement for European industrial policy. This reality will benefit the European research community.
Research is a global activity and requires global cooperation.
The commercialisation of the US research Internet was a mistake that Europe never made but it was a mistake that Europe is still helping to pay for. Today Europe pays over 90 percent of the cost of the more than 280 Mbps of connectivity that connect European researchers to their North American counterparts even though the benefit is balanced. Internet 2 is a grass roots US initiative that will move the US research Internet away from the commodity Internet that has failed to deliver quality services at acceptable prices A more balanced approach to research networking on both sides of the Atlantic should make it much easier to resolve this financial imbalance. There is a second important challenge for the next generation of European research network. This is to provide predictable and acceptable quality of service to its users.