012.40 SWITCH
by Juergen Harms
<harms@cui.unige.ch>

SWITCH is the Swiss national network for research and higher
education.  It operates under the responsibility of the SWITCH
foundation, created in 1987 by the Swiss federal government and
the 8 states ("cantons") with a university.

SWITCH is funded by usage-proportional contributions from member
universities and by selling its services for the support of
education and research activities in public organizations and
industry.  For central support and for the operation of its
services, SWITCH has created a head office with staff of some 10+
persons, located in Zurich.  More detailed information on SWITCH
can be obtained from postmaster@switch.ch.

SWITCH operates its own IP backbone network, based on a trunk of
2 Mbps lines and some lower-speed lines to terminal sites with
low traffic, which also provides high-speed connectivity to
partner networks in Europe and overseas.  Sites connected to
SWITCH include all Swiss universities, vocational training
schools, service providers like public libraries and the Swiss
high performance computing center in southern Switzerland,
government and industry research laboratories and international
organi like ISO and the ITU (note the CERN is a networking entity
entirely independent from SWITCH).

SWITCH provides and supports a set of value-added services, the
most important being "SWITCHmail" and "SWITCHinfo."  SWITCH makes
it a policy to focus on international standards, where feasible,
of the OSI family.  Thus SWITCH has been one of the pioneers of
the introduction of X.400 services in Europe (the share of X.400
in the overall national mail traffic went as high as 50 percent,
although at the level of the end user this percentage is
substantially lower).  Presently, SWITCH is very active in the
introduction of a national X.500 infrastructure, integrated into
the European PARADISE project.