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.

Although not having the possibility to share the champaign in Paris, we at SwipNet do share your pride and joy that the Ebone ring is closed and the resilient backbone complete. We see this as a significant achievment in the creation of an infra stracture for both R&D and commercial IP traffic which eventually will span the glob. Thanks and congratulations to you and all EAT- and EOT-members, skipper and mates. Olle Wallner