N-1-1-040.92 EARN by Frode Greisen* Established in 1985, EARN has become a stable provider of networking services for research and academic users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. EARN is an organization with country membership and technically, the services are totally integrated with the CREN services. EARN now comprises 950 host computers in 550 institutions in 27 countries and the traffic volume increased by 57% from 1989 to 1990 up to a volume of 6 billion records. Geographically, the main recent development was the connection of new East European countries. This happened quickly after a statement was obtained from the US Department of Commerce that EARN could connect to COCOM proscribed countries - with some restrictions on speed and services and as long as appropriate safeguard procedures were established at the supercomputer sites on the network. Poland was first to connect, soon followed by Hungary, CSFR and USSR. Furthermore, Rumania, Bulgaria and Lithuania have advanced plans connect. What EARN offers to the new countries is that by becoming a member of just one organization, and by using well established and widely accessible technology, they can exchange electronic mail and files with 45 other EARN/BITNET countries. Furthermore, they can use the value added services on the network and due to the gateways and bilateral agreements of EARN and CREN with other networking organizations they can communicate with colleagues in a total of 90 countries. Networking is in rapid change so is EARN. Basically, EARN is a store and forward network using IBM's NJE protocol which is emulated most of the major operating systems. Some years ago an EARN OSI project was established and this project has now been successfully concluded. With generous support from DEC, IBM and Northern Telecom software stacks were developed and systems installed enabling countries to run the NJE protocol on top of the five lower OSI layers, including X.25. Several countries now employ this system for their international EARN traffic using the private European X.25 network IXI, which is temporarily provided by the European COSINE project. However, other countries chose to rely on the TCP/IP protocol suite which to run NJE the same way CREN core sites ship traffic via NSFnet. According to this move, in 1991 EARN has developed a regionalization plan to group the EARN hosts around core sites which have multiple links between them. This means both increased bandwidth and alternative routes in case of line failure so that users get improved performance and reduced response times. The regionalization has only been economically feasible by cooperation and line sharing with other organizations. In the mid-eighties, a 9.600 bps EARN line was often the only international connection for academic networking in a country whereas the community is now slowly but steadily taking advantage of economy of scale by sharing international lines running from 64 kbps up to 2 Mbps. In 1990, EARN adopted a strategic plan. Working according to this EARN has increased its geographic coverage and large portions of the network has moved to higher speeds. Focus has been put on tools and documentation to make the use of the network easier for new and occasional users. Work is going on to improve application services such as data base access. The goal is to continually provide easy to use low cost networking services to the community. *Chief Consultant, UNI-C