The chart above shows an increase of the www sites percentage for all categories, and a more rapid increase in case of high schools and universities and in case of regional and local authorities.

The highest percentage belongs to national ministries. In Romania, November 2000 was an election month and few new national ministries were defined. We believe that the present ministries www sites will be inherited by the new ministries and more than that the ministries without a www site will develop their own www sites.

Even though the percentage of universities and high schools is high, it is expected to increase further as they succeed in connecting to the RoEduNet network. The Romanian Education Network (RoEduNet) was created in July 1993. From the very beginning RoEduNet was conceived as an open structure, offering free access to the academic, scientific and cultural nonprofit institutions; once the first institution was connected – the University of Bucharest, August 1993 – the nucleus of the academic data communication infrastructure was created. The RoEduNet data communication infrastructure covers the national territory and offers international connectivity through two high speed channels – 1.5Mbps with TaideNet and 4Mbps with LoralOrion. As the current links to Taide and LoralOrion are full at 100% most of the time they are currently negotiating with GEANT for a terrestrial E3 link.

Regional and local authorities percentage is expected to increase further as they wish to present their activity and to collect feedback from people.

Other categories with a large presence on the Internet are web portals, software companies, publications (magazines and journals), trade companies and TV companies.

The rather low percentage of www sites related to categories as primary and secondary schools, hospital/clinics and libraries is due to the great number of such institutions located in the rural area. Most of the www sites of these categories belong to the main institutions located in big towns.

The low percentage of museums with www sites is due to the fact that only few museums form large towns have funding available for an Internet connection.

In Romania there are several ways for end-users Internet connection. The ways offered by most of the ISPs (Internet Service Provider) are leased and switched lines through the ROMTELECOM telephone network. There are also ISPs offering connections through ISDN lines (see www.ines.ro), through TV cable (CATV) or optical fiber (see www.kappa.ro), through satellite (see www.elcomsky.ro) and through radio modem (see www.elcomsky.ro).

From preventing traffic between Romanian users from going through international lines, BUHIX (see www.buhix.ro) has been created. BUHIX is a facility for interconnecting the Romanian ISPs, which gives them the possibility of not charging the traffic between them and therefore of lowering the Internet access costs for their clients. In order to offer high speed connectivity to as many localities as possible, some ISPs have implemented their own terrestrial networks with backbones covering the main towns of the country.

International ISPs are also present in Romania, the most important are KPNQwest (see www.kpnqwest.ro) and Euroweb (see www.euroweb.ro).

If some of the problems raised for institutions by the Internet connection can be solved rather easily, some other are more difficult to be solved. Within the first category one can consider computers’ price which is not inaccessible. Another such problem is represented by availability of experienced specialists. Hence, although this branch of activity is rather new, it has widely expanded during the last years, a lot of young people focusing their studies on it. Romanian high schools and universities are preparing an increasing number of professionals in this field, providing them with the most recent information available worldwide. Therefore Romanian companies which intend to employ such specialists, will have to choose among those who better meet their employment criteria. As the salary level is rather low, companies will have no problem this far. Within the second category one can consider the Internet connection. Its high price makes it one of the most important obstacles for those institutions who wish to have Internet access.

Although there is a great diversity of connecting methods the connection prices, which are rather high if they are compared salaries level, make the Internet connection inaccessible for most of private persons, especially for those living in rural area, where the access is provided mainly by long distance telephone calls.

When the price of the Internet connection will be more accessible, its utilisation in Romania will be much wider.