Gigabit Networking in Norway Infrastructure, Applications and Projects

Norway is a country with large geographical dimensions and a very low number of inhabitants. This combination makes advanced telecommunication services and distributed multimedia applications, like telemedicine and distance education, very important for the Norwegian society. Obviously, an appropriate networking infrastructure is necessary to enable such services and applications. In order to cover all important locations in Norway, this network represents a very large Wide-Area Network (WAN) within a single nation. This paper describes the Norwegian academic networking infrastructure, and gives an overview of Norwegian research institutions, programs, and projects. Furthermore, we describe in two case studies one examplary multimedia application and one ongoing research project in the area of gigabit networking and multimedia middleware.