GA(03)024
TERENA visit in Lithuania
Report
Valentino Cavalli
18-July-2003
Rev. 18 August 2003
Introduction
Valentino Cavalli and Kevin Meynell went on a mission to Lithuania on 3 and 4 July 2003 for a visit organized jointly by TERENA and LITNET, the NREN of Lithuania. This was the first in a series of planned visits to TERENA members in less-served countries. The next mission in the series, a visit from John Dyer and Valentino Cavalli to Latvia, is currently being prepared and expected to take place during October 2003.
The goals of TERENA in these missions can be summarized as:
- to learn about the member organization, their operations and needs
- explore areas where TERENA could provide some assistance; these can be technical, managerial, political, financial
Specifically TERENA is interested in knowing from the NREN:
- information about the network, the services and the technology in use
- better understanding of funding and management
- what are the difficulties, inhibitors
Generally speaking TERENA expects the member organization to learn about TERENA and how they can be involved in TERENA activities as well as to better understand the benefit of being part of TERENA.
The mission in Lithuania was not only of technical nature. LITNET organized meetings with the LITNET staff and Executive Board, as well as with several universities in Lithuania, but also meetings with government officials and members of ICT commissions at government and parliament level.
Programme
3 July, Vilnius
Visit to Ministry of Science and Education / 9.30 – 10.00Visit in Lithuania Seimas (Parliament),
Information Society Committee / 10.30 – 11.00
Meeting and share experience with LITNET users / 11.30 – 13.00
Lunch at Law University of Lithuania / 13.00 – 14.00
Meeting with representatives of Research institutes and Law University of Lithuania / 14.00 – 15.30
Visits to Vilnius University / 16.00 – 17.00
4 July, Kaunas
Meeting with Rector of the Lithuanian University of Agriculture, / 10.00-10.45Visit to Kaunas Medical University / 11.15-12.45
Lunch with Rector of Kaunas University of Technology / 13.00-14.30
Visit to Kaunas University of Technology (Studentu str. 48), LITNET NOC,
Review of the Litnet resource usage at KTU:
Kaunas regional distance education study centre,
Presentation of the national project:
LieDM - Developing Distance Education in Lithuania; LABT 2003;
LieMSIS. / 14.30-16.00
Coffee break and tour of the ITPI / 16.00-16.20
LITNET NOC activity / 16.20-17.00
Evening meeting, open discussions in café
between Vilnius and Kaunas 18.00 – 21.00
Visit Report
The meeting at the Ministry of Science and Education was attended by the Minister, Algirdas Monkevicius, and Vice-minister, Rimantas Vaitkus. LITNET was represented by Petras Sulcas and Laimutis Telksnys chairman of the board. During 30 minutes of the visit TERENA introduced the 4 pillars of the organization, a few major technical activities, the SERENATE and the Compendium projects. The vice-minister was very interested in the results of the projects and especially in those relating to NRENs operating dark fibre and the rationale of connecting schools. The visit was considered very useful by LITNET.
At the Lithuanian Seimas (Parliament), Kevin, Valentino, Petras and Laimutis met Mr Ramunas Cepaitis, from the Information Society Committee. This meeting was not very interactive because an interpreter was needed, it was however considered useful in terms of PR.
Several LITNET user organizations had been invited to a meeting at the Academy of Sciences. A more comprehensive overview of TERENA was given there, pointing out the task forces and projects. Several questions ware asked by Mr Evaldas Zidonis, Information Society Development Committee under the Government of the Republic of Lithuania on SERENATE. In particular there was an extensive discussion about the new regulatory package for Telecommunications and its impact for NRENs. Providing services by the NREN to user communities and areas normally not served by commercial ISPs, like primary and secondary schools throughout the country and farmers in rural areas, was not seen as a competition problem. The Lithuanian government is preparing the necessary measures to implement it and was interested in looking at the details of the SERENATE recommendations.
At the Law University of Lithuania the group met the Head of Administration, Antanas Keras, and visited the Computer Centre and the Library. The Law University, and other universities visited in Vilnius and in Kaunas have 1 Gbit/s connectivity to LITNET and GE in the campus. Connectivity is usually provided at campus level either via fibre or WLAN. Connectivity on campus includes the student dorms. The University is running various applications including student information system and library on-line catalogue.
The meeting at the Lithuanian University of Agriculture in Kaunas was attended by the Rector, Albinas Kusta, the Director, Aleksandras Savilionis, the Chief Coordinator, Raimundas Rukuiza and the Network Administrator, Tomas Valiukevicius.
Agriculture is the major activity in Lithuanian economy and, particularly with accession to the EU the country is facing many changes, which include modernization of production and education of farmers. The university is doing cross-discipline collaboration with chemical and genetic research. A major project at the university is devoted to promoting education and business orientation of farmers. The project collects data according to EU agriculture regulations and aims at providing information and education to rural areas, which are currently not served by any connectivity provider. Connecting rural areas is a major strategic goal of LITNET.
The meeting at the Kaunas Medical University Hospital was chaired by the Vice-rector, Prof Irena Miseviciene.
The presentation of TERENA activities focused mainly on EC research activities in FP5 and FP6. The team from the Kaunas Medical University had prepared a number of presentations about the network and IT infrastructure at the University and several projects in eHealth, eEducation and Telemedicine. The University has GE on campus, VLAN is used to provide data protection and security. They support applications in telemedicine, virtual libraries and distance education. The plans for the future foresee the set up of IP telephony services and greater inter-connection of hardware medical devices and measurement tools to support medical applications and. The eHealth project is an ambitious plan following the strategic goals of the eEurope 2005 plan and involves a number of measures to provide services to the general public. The major issues to be addressed regard data protection and security, which need to be addressed at the level of policies and technology. The eHealth project team is very interested in opportunities made available in FP6 and by the availability of EU regional funds. The eEducation project is meant to provide distance education services mostly targeting public health professionals and practitioners. Telemedicine is quite developed in the University, they started with the LITMED 2000 project in collaboration with the University Hospital in Lund, Sweden.
Kevin gave an extensive presentation focused on the TERENA Technical Programme at the meeting at KTU, the Kaunas University of Technology, which is also hosting ITPI, the Information Technology Development Institute, which provides the LITNET NOC. The meeting was held in the Distance Education Video studio of KTU and was chaired by the University Director, Rimantas Seinauskas.
The IT Programme for Science and Higher Education 2001-2006 was confirmed by the Ministry of Science and Education in 2001. Members of KTU presented the following sub-programmes:
- Academic Libraries Network, LABT
- Research Information System, LieMSIS
- Distance Education, LieDM
The LABT programme involves 55 libraries in Lithuania and is based on the ALEPH 500 1.4 software, providing distributed database and application development tools. Thanks to a grant from UNESCO, KTU has developed a unified search system called Metalib, expected to be fully operational in September 2003. The programme has three components regarding network connectivity: LABT-U connecting 16 university libraries at 100 Mbit/s, LABT-M, connecting 28 scientific institution libraries and LABT-K, connecting 9 university college libraries. The network capacity of LABT-M and LABT-K varies in the range of 256 Kbit/s and 100 Mbit/s.
The goal of the LieMSIS sub-programme is to introduce an ERP information system. The activity started in 1998 as a PHARE project and as of today had produced a Student Admission System.
The LieDM sub-programme is well developed and provides distance education services to several institutions. Three studios and DE centers/classrooms are available to produce content for 80 institutions. The applications provide courses at seven master-level degrees, including professional training and computer science. The Distance Education Centre ODL has developed a Course Development Kit. Videoconference is provided on an experimental basis in the ViPS project. ViPS does not provide live streaming at the moment however the project would benefit from interaction with the activities of TF-NETCAST.
The opportunities to collaborate in TERENA activities include IP Telephony, TF-NETCAST.
The meeting at ITPI (IT Development Institute), which hosts the LITNET NOC was the richest in terms of the information given to TERENA.
The director of the Computer Networking center, Rimantas Kavaliunas, presented the LITNET network, the services and development activities of LITNET. Presentations of specific NOC activities, including the CSIRT and management of the .lt domain were given by the relevant LITNET staff members.
LITNET connects all R&D institutions in Lithuania, including 15 universities and 40 research institutes. They started connecting schools in 2000 and serve now 250. They plan to connect all schools in the next 2-3 years. LITNET also serves various not-for-profit organizations, including 30 libraries, several museums, health, environment and government institutions, science and technology parks, based on criteria that the service is provided for joint research activities or social activities. A new criterion, recently introduced and quite promising is that the connected institutions provide life-long learning. The overall customer basis of LITNET is about 130,000 end users. LITNET has regional centers in 14 cities.
The LITNET Board coordinates the development and management of the network. An Expert Group prepares projects and development proposals, the NOC, based in Kaunas operates the network and acts as the largest Regional Centre of Lithuania. Regional Centres in other 13 cities are responsible for operation on access links and user support.
The activities of the NOC include network operation, GÉANT connectivity, network planning and implementation, procurements, CERT, pilot projects (including IPv6, which is enabled on the university campuses but not on the backbone) and the .lt domain registry. The staff is composed of 15 people plus 5 employed in the .lt domain registry.
A 155 Mbit/s link connects LITNET to GÉANT, but the actual load is always more than 100 Mbit/s. Un upgrade to 622 Mbit/s has been agreed and should be available from 1 August 2003. They do not have a backup link, except a 10 Mbit/s connection to Delfi. A second high capacity international link is urgently required.
The LITNET backbone has 622 Mbit/s links between Vilnius and Kaunas and 155 Mbit/s to three major cities a number of leased lines provide 1-4 Mbit/s connectivity to other 9 cities. Long distance (10-30 Km) wireless links at 2.4 GHz are widely used in some areas. LITNET has just started evaluation of a tender for a ring between the 5 major cities.
Since 2002 some universities and research institutions have fibre connecting to LITNET PoPs in major cities, however most smaller institutions are still connected via Wireless links. LITNET aims at connecting all major institutions to their PoPs using fibre.
Development of new services is still rather limited. The major projects are on IPv6 (LITNET has been talking recently to Cisco about joining 6NET, but without success) and IP Telephony –KTU and Vilnius University have IP-Telephony gateways to their PBX and LITNET plans to extend this network to other universities in the near future. Obviously the IP Telephony Cookbook would be a useful tool for them. Multicast is very much behind, mostly because the LAN switches used today do not support it. A small pilot project in this area is to transmit some TV channels via IP networks to student dormitories. In this area it might be useful for LITNET to have some involvement in TF-NETCAST, in particular in the phase of studying the feasibility of an Academic TV service. QoS experiments are still in the very initial phase. They only provide VLANs and shaping at the moment. MPLS has not been introduced yet.
The major extension projects are LMKT and RAIN. LMKT proposes to connect all schools via a two-layer architecture. Schools would be connected via wireless or VPN to a local administration. Local administrations would connect to regional networks connected to LITNET. LITNET would also provide common services and security. RAIN stands for Rural Area Broadband Interconnection Network and aims at providing fibre or broadband wireless connectivity to rural areas. This project has gained some momentum now and it might be possible to get money from the EU regional funds for its implementation. LITNET has been looking at the Polish PIONIER project and has been talking to Stanislaw Starzak in Poland to get some information. Obviously the network footprint in Lithuania would be much smaller than in Poland. LITNET is looking for help in this project.
Many more interesting details have been provided in the presentations at ITPI. They have been made available to TERENA on a CD-ROM, which is in a dossier on Valentino’s desk.
At the end of the mission LITNET staff and members of the board offered Kevin and Valentino a dinner at a restaurant outside Vilnius, a nice opportunity to summarise the main outcome of the visit.
Main Recommendations
LITNET should work on promoting participation of researchers and engineers from Lithuanian Universities in TERENA task forces and FP6 projects by encouraging them to subscribe to TERENA email distribution lists and monitor the TERENA web site for updates on task forces and projects results. Specifically it is recommended that LITNET focus on:
- TF-NETCAST to encourage the development of Lithuania steaming and Video conferencing – see URL:
- Follow the development of the IP Telephony Cookbook with a view to gaining information on implementation in Lithuania – see URL:
TERENA to work with LITNET on the following areas:
- investigate possible contributions in the key areas of international connectivity, support for connecting schools and providing fibre to rural areas.
- TERENA to broker contact between LITNET and the project partners working on IPv6 based projects