"Using powerful, low cost academic networks to assist Eastern Europe: examples of a value added perspective"

In spite of the major expense of improving the Eastern European telecommunications infrastructure - - hundreds of billions of dollars over at least a decade - - academic networks provide an interim capability for researchers that is quite promising. Since Western European nations have been successfully using these robust, low unit cost networks for over a decade, the major development and implementation expense can be considered amortized, allowing new network users the combined advantage of rapid connection and outstanding support service from the vast network of competent, experienced users. The perspective offered is one of examining the unit cost of such network services, rather than the more amorphous value structures frequently used in assessing progress of a new technology in a developing country. With the unit cost criterion as a basis, the use of existing academic networks, especially the European Academic Research Network (EARN), is shown to be in the range of one tenth to one hundredth the cost per transmission of fax, telephone or cable and far below the cost per message of the mail system. Transmissions arrive at their destinations in minutes or less. The favorable cost of these communications systems can be given greater leverage by the providing of value added services that provide users with a broad range of help, particularly in the context of training and integration with the hundreds of other networks beyond EARN, making it possible to link to hundreds of thousands of researchers in over sixty countries of the world for a few cents per transmission. To operationalize the perspective offered, actual data from Czechoslovakia are included showing exponential rises in both the user population and the volume of message traffic in and outside the country. Finally, a test case is suggested, that of Romania, a country that has not entered the international network process yet, but which could quickly achieve the described benefits after a short period of using value added services.