Connectivity Providers Database

From: eric johnson <71760.2361@COMPUSERVE.COM> Date: 12 Apr 1993 19:16:04 -0400 (EDT) Friends, On occasion over the past five years I've written "updates" about what I'm up to since many of you have found it interesting. Here's another: [ non-network material deleted ] From various places, to see if it was possible, I placed telephone call orders to the US, and as a rule got through within 15-20 min at a cost of 580 R/min but going up all the time. In Moscow now there's an AT&T USA Direct number (155-5042) which is very handy but sometimes goes down at nights. It costs about $3.25/min, or over $4/min for collect calls. However, from Moscow I had no problem, ever, dialing direct to the US (day or night)--I understand there are now 5-6000 int'l circuits as opposed the the previous 1100. On the networking side, I spent a week in Moscow with the US NSF's director for interagency networking examining the state of computer networking for Soros's "Int'l Science Foundation" which has $100M to spend trying to help FSU science and scientists over the next 2 yrs. We visited all the major networks. RELCOM in spite of its hefty prices (for Russian academics) is developing very quickly and successfully in large part because its technical people in Moscow (Rudin, Volodin, Taburovskii are the ones we met) are of top quality. Both RELCOM and DEMOS folks said th raskol (split) between them is over and they're back together. I saw the telephone switching station (M9) where they have all their leased lines (running TCP-IP) between Moscow and a dozen other cities coming in, and we visited their setups in the Kurchatov Institute and in the Demos HQ across the river from the Kremlin. Relcom's prices are now in dollars though you can of course pay in rubles at the Central Bank rate--now nearing 700. Each node can set its own prices but most follow Moscow's: initial reg--$10; connection, $0.04/minute; int'l mail, $0.05/K sent and received; domestic mail, $0.01/K. The monthly fee has been dropped but connect time charges have been added, at least in Moscow. Prices don't include 20% VAT. Some institutes said 15 to 20 % of their entire annual budget is now going to connectivity, so important do they think this is--and so expensive is it for them. A big but cheap gift any American university could provide for a Russian counterpart (in a sister city?) would be to pay its hundred-dollar/mo e-mail costs. The Sprint HQ in the central PTT bldg in Moscow is also very impressive--the NCC (network control center) is very well equipped and always staffed, and banks of modems are always checking out Sprint's X.25 circuits in other cities (a dozen, at last count, and more coming on line all the time). Freenet/SUEARN is a small group of very energetic people, but the claims made for it are a bit overblown; there are a dozen or so institutes and universities on line but it's difficult to see where the "70" that Mr Mendkovich claims comes from. That's not to denigrate it--it's working!--but slowly and ungainly. The very young Evgenii Mironov seems to be the heart of the operation. ISF is considering putting in a cisco router in the Sprint office to make a 64-Kbps satellite connection to the GIX in DC available to all Russian networks which in return will provide free access to scientists the country over. There are a number of international links already in; RELCOM is on the verge of opening a leased line to Finland through StPete. The Institute of High Energy Physics has its own line to Germany (9.6, soon 64). NASA's apparently putting in a 256-K line to the Space Research Institute (IKI). I brought back a new master list of all RELCOM addresses and their owners and telephone numbers (as of mid-Feb 93); it's over 600 K, with each entry having some info in Russian and some in English. If you want it send a self- addressed stamped disk mailer to me at 3003 Van Ness #W1110, Wash DC 20008- 4809. I also have a list of Sprint access numbers throughout the FSU in case anyone needs it (among gobs of other information). RELARN is not much clearer to me than when I went over; it appears to the be the agency through which the gov't wants to pay part of the costs for scientific and educational users of Relcom, but its resources are extremely limited. It's executive agency is RosNIIROS, the Institute of Public Networking--though the impression remains that RELARN's ties are closer to RELCOM than to any of its competitors (Sovam Teleport, Glasnet, Sprint, Remart). [ more material deleted ]