The EARNEST Foresight Study Discussion Session Group C Chairman: John Boland, Rapporteur: Jorge-A. Sanchez-P. Participants: Mauro Campanella, Avi Cohen, Kees Neggers, Dirk Franke, Steen Pedersen, Niels Raun, Jan Windmueller, Martin Bech, Martin Klimo, Rossend Llurba, Ian Clarke Berlin, 24 May 2006

The EARNEST Foresight Study Question 1: How will (National) Research and Education Networks distinguish themselves (in the next 5-10 years) from commercial providers? A successful NREN has to anticipate the needs of the users, otherwise will soon become obsolete. NRENs need to focus on advanced services (e.g. λ switching), not commercially available. NRENs need to keep full control of the networking infrastructure while at the same time leave it open. NRENs can/should invest in projects with higher risk and serve user’s minorities with specific needs which will never be a "business case“. NRENs should go up in the protocols stack creating economies of scale but be careful that moving up may change the operating model (millions of users instead of decades). The Pan-European NREN solidarity, the collaborative role of European NRENs that allows for taking care of aspects like the digital divide or e2e services also differentiate their role. Marketing the mission and role of NRENs is important. –Comparing solely on a cost-basis, NRENs can be challenged since more than 90% of our users are “normal users” in terms of demand. –Carriers/ISPs may be able to provide most of the services that an NREN provides but, unlike NRENs, will do so on a “project”-basis.

The EARNEST Foresight Study Question 2: The essence of the Norwegian GigaCampus project is that the national network/services and the local network/services are no longer seen as separate responsibilities but as a joint responsibility of the NREN and the local network people. Is this an example that should be followed (perhaps in slightly different forms) in all European countries? NRENs in many cases are doing similar things already. Nevertheless since e2e service provision is a key differentiator of NRENs, they have to put more attention to it and potentially take additional steps in that direction. Besides creating a “reference document” of the services that the NREN provides, in an effort to create awareness and influence the developments at the campuses, additionally consider also to: –coordinate common specifications –achieve endorsement by campuses –even influence their common or separate procurements. Eventually how far an NREN will go depends on local conditions. NRENs have to be careful since in this process they have to deal with different administrations and therefore different budgets and decision makers.

The EARNEST Foresight Study Question 3: Can research networks as launching customers of new technologies and products exert enough market pressure on vendors to enforce global standardisation? Standards is mainly an industry-driven process. NRENs have demand-aggregation power and are always operating on state-of-the-art. The best way to influence standards is by communicating an “NRENs’ wish-list” - potentially in a coordinated (collective) way. The vendors will then come with solutions, potentially standardizing them, as has happened before in many areas. NRENs should also avoid “standardization-on-paper” and go for “standardization-on-the-field”.

The EARNEST Foresight Study Question 4: Research networks give a lot of attention to “high-end” users. Do they give enough attention to “middleclass” and “low- end” users, making them aware of the technologies and services that they could use? Is there “latent usage”? NRENS should ensure "transparency" of their network to allow any user to work with and on the network in an innovative way. NRENs *have to* take into account the high-end/advanced users. –Currently these are the grid users, later may be others as grid services could become commodity in some years. –Why? because they are the ones with the new requirements asking for innovative solutions. For the low-end users the campuses have the major role to play. NRENs should not build networks according to any specific application, but build "general" purpose networks, which can be enriched/complemented by ad-hoc implementations.