EUnet was a very loose collaboration of individual European UNIX sites in the 1980s that evolved into the fully commercial entity EUnet International Ltd in 1996. It was sold to Qwest in 1998. EUnet played a decisive role in the adoption of TCP/IP in Europe beginning in 1988.
History
The roots of EUnet, originally an abbreviation for European UNIX Network, go back to 1982 under the auspices of the EUUG and the first internationalUUCP connections. FNET was the French branch of EUnet. Once there was a central European backbone node that was separate from the expensive telecom network, TCP/IP was adopted in place of store and forward. This enabled EUnet to connect with NSFNET and CERN’s TCP/IP connections. A connection to the US was also established. On January 1, 1990 EUnet began selling Internet access to non-academic customers in the Netherlands, making them one of the first companies to sell Internet access to the general public. EUnet provided local service through a respective national EUnet business partner in many European countries. In 1990 the Soviet IP-based networkRELCOM mostly operated by DEMOS powered computers was connected to the EUnet. In April 1998 the company together with nearly all of the national European business partners of EUnet was sold to Qwest Communications International, which in turn later merged EUnet into the illfated joint-venture KPNQwest. In year 2000 it was estimated that KPNQwest was carrying more than 50% of European IP traffic. Some of the ISPs operating under the name EUnet today can be traced back to the original EUnet, some not. Most national EUnet affiliates or subsidiaries predated other commercial Internet offerings in the respective countries by many years. To completely understand the importance and history of EUnet, it is important to realize that until the early 1990s nearly every European country had a telecommunications monopoly with an incumbent national PTT, and that commercial and non-commercial provision of telecommunications services was prohibited or at least took place in a legal "grey zone". During the same period, as part of an industrial political strategy to stop US domination of future network technology, the EC embarked on efforts to promote OSI protocols, founding for example RARE and associated national "research" network operators.
