RIPN has celebrated its 15th anniversary

Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN) has marked its 15th anniversary with a Moskva-river trip on board of "Amelie" boat. RIPN's friends and partners gathered on board of the ship. According to Birthday traditions there were a lot of presents and warm wishes addressed to the jubilant.

Director of RIPN A.P. Platonov summed up the results of the work done in the last 15 years. He pointed out that fifteen years is not a long enough period of time but the history of Russian Internet segment is only two years longer. With that in mind RIPN can be considered a veteran of this young and rapidly developing technological sphere which serves as a foundation of the twenty first century informational society.

RIPN was established by the State committee of RSFSR for Science and Higher Education and Atomic Energy Institute named after I.V. Kurchatov. That's why its strategy embraces the sphere of creation and development of scientific-educational networks This includes simple systems like e-mail that was merged with RELCOM "prototype-network" (as it is called in books on Internet history by foreign authors) and more complicated systems like Moscow optic fiber network and RBNet (Russian Backbone Network). The latter is an all Russian base network which was one of the largest Internet networks in Russia by the year 2000. At the present time RBNet is a part of the international ring telecommunication system GLORIAD, which is being created on a cooperation basis by companies of Russia, USA, China, Canada, Korea, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland.

RIPN has another important mission, reflected in the name "public networks" - development of Russian Internet segment structure-constituent systems. Above all we should mention technical support and development of the main Registry of Russian national top-level domain RU and its address system. Another project, which is probably not so well-known among nonprofessionals, but which is crucial for building the Network infrastructure: development of the Russian system of information threads (IP-traffic) exchange points - the Internet Exchange (IX) system. Many of the projects, started by RIPN in an initiative order, later on were transferred to independent and dynamic companies like RU-CENTER (domain names registration) and MSK-IX (Moscow IX support).

Many of the speakers mentioned that the new age is an age of information and pointed out that RIPN specialists are very active in their search of new ways to implement prospective network projects. They also expressed their firm belief that the main achievements of the Institute still lie ahead.

President of RSC "Kurchatov Institute" Academician E.P.Velikhov addressed a special letter to the management and employees of RIPN on the occasion of the Institute fifteenth anniversary. He wished them to continue to be on the frontline in the process of creation of information-communication basis aimed at development of science and education as well as its integration into a worldwide system of information processing, storage and exchange.