Dispatch from Europe: ESnet’s Hamburg connection
By Jon Bashor

While staying at the guest house at the Dresden University of Technology, I was joined at breakfast one day by a psychologist from the Czech Academy of Sciences. We got to talking and she asked me if I perchance knew her friend in California – her name was Marina and she lived in San Diego.

Such out-of-the-blue questions aren’t that uncommon in Europe, so three weeks later when I was eating lunch with the communications team at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, I wasn’t surprised when one of the people at the table said, “I know some people in Berkeley. Do you know Deb?”

It was obvious that he was referring to Deb Agarwal – there’s just one Deb when you’re talking about networking and on-demand connectivity. It turns out that Hans Frese, head of telecommunications and web operations at DESY, had met Deb through their common connection to a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBTO) working group.

But his connections with Berkeley Lab, and especially ESnet, go back more than 10 years. When asked who else he knows at Berkeley, Frese names ESnet head Bill Johnston right after Agarwal. It turns out that Frese has attended a number of ESnet Steering Committee meetings

“It became clear in the 1990s, that as high energy physics was increasingly relying on networks, that ESnet had a real advantage. They ran dedicated lines,” Frese said. ”ESnet was being built up to connect many of the labs we were working with and we were looking to extend that kind of capability across the European Community.”

ESnet was a dedicated network and it served a dedicated research community, unlike other networks which took a more generalist approach, Frese said.

“ESnet is important to the German Networking Association,” Frese said. “One of the most important points is that ESnet was interested in co-funding the trans-Atlantic connection.”

In Germany, the first link was to Munich, in support of fusion research.

Another important service provided by ESnet starting in the 1990s was videoconferencing, which was run over ISDN lines at the start. Back then, a telecom might changes its switch without telling anyone, disrupting planned videoconferences, Frese said. Today, as more organizations are moving to using the H323 protocol for videoconferencing over the Internet, conference hosts sometimes find access blocked at the last minute when an institution changes the port scheme in its firewall.

“History repeats itself,” Frese says with a sly grin.

Among the services offered by ESnet which helped make videoconferencing work, Frese said, was the room reservation system, which took different time zones into account, “so you would actually have all the people attending at the same time,” Frese explains. It also helped conference organizers know who would be attending.

And while problems with firewalls have kept Internet-based videoconferencing below expectations, videoconferencing over phone lines continues. As head of telecommunications for DESY, this falls within Frese’s bailiwick.

It was his work in telecommunications that led to his involvement in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna. Back when the Iron Curtain still divided Europe, DESY had two phone connections to the east, one to the physics research lab at Zeuthen (now known as DESY Zeuthen) in East Germany and one to Moscow. The data transmission speed was all of 2400 baud.

Once the Soviet Union imploded, freelancers there began selling available bandwidth on under-utilized Red Army satellites, which increased the number of connections to the former Soviet Union and helped open the various countries to the world. Frese has helped establish telecommunications stations in many former Soviet republics in Central Asia, including one instance where a container load of equipment was held for ransom.

This experience resulted in an invitation by the German government in 1997 to become a member of one of two working groups created to set up the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty verification network. The treaty verification network is an international network connecting 321 monitoring stations around the world. The goal is to monitor in real-time whether there are any activities that could be the result of nuclear weapon testing. Besides the monitoring stations, the signatories of the treaty are also connected to the network along with an International Data Center in Vienna. Berkeley Lab’s Agarwal brings her expertise in multicast protocols to the effort.

“Hans and I keep running into each other besides the CTBT work,” said Agarwal. “He is very plugged in to many of the ESnet activities and seems to usually have a good intuition about things.”

Jon Bashor, public affairs officer for Computing Sciences, is on leave this summer, working with communications groups at research organizations in Europe. He filed this dispatch from Germany.

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