Internet in Slovenia Celebrates 15 Years
Fifteen years have passed since research institution Jozef Stefan Institute (IJS) established an internet connection with the Dutch Institute for Physics and Mathematics (NIKHEF). This was the first internet connection in Slovenia and one of only 200 internet points of that time.
"In statistical terms, Slovenia is exceptionally well covered with internet access," said Jure Zupan, Slovenian minister of higher education, science and technology, at the event taking place at IJS in Ljubljana on Monday. However, he said internet coverage in remoter areas was worse.
The expansion of broadband access is enabled by two factors, the supply of services and content and the development of competition, said Matjaz Jansa, Head of the Directorate for Electronic Communications at the Economy Ministry.
He said much had been done in this sphere as a tender for the 3rd generation of mobile communications, the UMTS, stirred up the competition. Positive trends are also seen in wireless broadband access, he added.
The increase in competition of broadband service providers will enable the users in remoter areas to acquire access to broadband communications, especially where there was previously no interest of service providers because of big investment costs, he said. "This is one of the methods to bring broadband access to remote areas," Jansa pointed out.
However, according to him, liberalising the market alone will not be enough. Therefore, the government has embarked on a project which aims at bringing sufficient broadband access to all residents by 2010. In the long-term, by 2020, the project aims at bringing public optical networks to 90 % of the households, he explained.
The history of internet dates back to the early development of communication networks in the 50s and 60s, when the American Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed a network for military purposes. Broader use of the internet began two decades later, with the implementation of the TCP/IP as the standard for interconnecting different types of networks and exchange of data.
Later, in the early 90s, Gopher and World Wide Web (www) appeared, starting the ever-increasing use of the internet.
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