The city of Oslo welcomed the 200 NORDUnet participants at the beautiful City Hall Tuesday evening. Fine architecture, impressive murals, Spanish tapas and chilled refreshments all created a perfect venue for the opening reception and some informal social networking.
Wednesday morning the plenary session made room for some futuristic perspectives on the NRENs and their services. Geoff Huston talked about the need for more than just one internet protocol, and illustrated his many points by specific statistics and more personal experiences. According to the audience’s feedback, his lecture had some humorous aspects, as well.
Lars -Johan Limann proceeded with a few reflections on whether or not the internet as such can be considered as infrastructure. Liman’s conclusion was that yes, the internet is indeed crucial infrastructure. Thus, his main message to the NRENs was that they must recognize that they are in fact building common infrastructure, and that this implies quite a bit of responsibility in most ICT fields.
Some key words for the three parallel tracks were; infrastructure construction under extreme climate conditions, wireless connectivity for education, network monitoring, etc. The so-called “lightning talks” session covered a wide range of more experimental services and ideas, each of which was presented in maximum 3 minutes!
Several presenters have stressed the point that NRENs should cooperate rather than compete with commercial network providers. No matter what the conclusion are, the NORDUnet conference brings evidence of vast developments within each of the NRENs, but also of how most activities are internationally and closely intertwined on different levels.
