Congrats boss, its inspiring. We in India are in the threshold of starting to build a nationwide robust good performance IP backbone, with rapid expansion capability to cover over 500 academic and research institutions in the next 12 months (365 days) with full IP connectivity. For info, I may mention that we do have an IP network at present it covers only about a dozen institutions with the rest of the 100 odd institutions being covered only by e-mail. The Indian academic and research network I am talking about is ERNET and is an Associate Member of RARE. Many of the key players of RARE/ European academic/research network scene have helped us in the last couple of years as members of an UNDP sponsered Expert Panel which meets once a year to review, advise, guide and set directions. Prof. Kirstein of UCL, Dr.Klaus Ullmann of RARE (and the President of RARE uptil recently) and Dr.Bob Cooper have been (and still are) members of the expert panel apart from Dr.Vint Cerf, VP, CNRI and currently President of the recently formed Internet Society. So pl accept our (from ERNET community in India) congrats on yr superb performance in setting up EBONE IP in such a short time and so well. We are equally proud of the European academic and research networking community and look forward to emulating the worthy example in the Indian scene. We also look forward to learning specific lessons from yr IP backbone ( as well as other issues) experience and wd appreciate some visit(s) from some of yr key members(who participated in yr recent successful effort) to ERNET, India in the coming months (not later than March '93, as our UNDP funding - the current phase- expires by then). Also we look forward to fruitful collaborative linkages (including specific joint projects) with the European community in a number of Engineering, research, product development, specifi- cation formulation, planning, performance analysis, simulation, new applicat- ions, end-user services, joint conferences, etc. I can list suggestive topics in each of the above areas but I guess it may be a little pre-mature to bore you too much too soon w/o ascertaining yr disposition ( or that of yr community) to the overall idea/concept (What are these bunch of guys from India trying to propose in the name of joint collaboration/cooperation, someone may cynically ask :-( ) ! Wd appreciate yr response at yr convenience. Congrats again. ramki (S.Ramakrishnan) Project Director(ERNET) and Director, Department of Electronics, Govt. of India

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From: boss@ebone.net Subject: The Complete EBONE Up and Running !!! Date: Sat, 26 Sep 92 23:08:33 +0200 Sender: boss@sunet.se

To the European IP community,

This is to inform you that today, Sunday 26 September 1992, the final link of the initially defined EBONE, the London-Montpellier link, was put in place. The EBONE is now complete as a resilient pan-European IP backbone.

September 1, 1991, after an initiative by Kees Neggers, a small group of people gathered for the first time, in an office building outside Amsterdam, to see if it could be possible to build a pan-European IP backbone. Today, 390 days later, the full backbone is up and running. Without all the voluntary efforts put in this would never have been possible. As a result we today see one of the worlds technically most advanced backbones in Europe.

I must admit I have never seen a group with so much expertise gathered around the table and with so much enthusiasm in making this knowledge serve the European networking user community. I will by this give my deep gratitude to all those people involved in the fulfillment of the first pan-European IP backbone.

To make it short:

WE MADE IT!!! ========================

There is some bottles of champaign waiting in Paris :-)

See you there all of you,

Bernhard Stockman. Chair of the EBONE Action Team.