Another major milestone will be achieved in April with the re-deployment of our dedicated transatlantic line from C&W/Chicago to KPNQwest/Chicago, whilst simultaneously increasing the capacity from 20Mbps to 45Mbps. CERN will connect from its Point of Presence to the Intercontinental Internet Exchange Point in Chicago, sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and known as STARTAP (Science Technology and Research Transit Access Point). This will give us direct access to a number of US, Canadian and Asia-Pacific networks such as ESnet, vBNS, Internet2/Abilene, Canarie as well as to commercial ISPs willing to establish direct peerings with CERN.

Our transatlantic connectivity is organized through a consortium led by CERN, with IN2P3, the World Health Organization (WHO), North-american and Canadian HEP communities through Caltech Institute and Carleton University.

Thanks to exceptional circumstances causing the price/bandwidth ratio to drop very significantly again, following a call for tender made during the last quarter of 1999, the above upgrade will be achieved at approximately constant budget levels. The result is that we now start to have adequate capacity for all normal CERN requirements, in particular for exporting sizeable amounts of physics data all over the world, in a coordinated and controlled manner. Further improvements are expected during the course of the year.