IN CROATIA ABOUT 76,000 CONNECTIONS TO INTERNET

ZAGREB, Jan 14 (Hina) - In Croatia there are currently 76,000 connections to Internet, according to an estimate of the Croatian Academic and Research Net "CARNET". More than 35,000 links are from the educational sector, while 41,000 connections are from the commercial sector. No information about the governmental sector was provided to the CARNET, said Vesna Vrga, the CARNET international cooperation department's head. Vrga told Hina that these data had been gathered by the "Central and Eastern European Networking Association (CEENET) in December 1998 from several Central and Eastern European countries. According to the CEENET statistics, Poland has 500,000 connections to the Internet, Hungary 255,000, Slovakia 230,000 and the Czech Republic has 213,000 lines toward the Internet. In Croatia, there are five providers of Internet and four of them are commercial - "Hinet" (Croatian Telecommunications-Net), IBM Croatia, BBM and "Iskon" - while, CARNET is a not-for-profit organisation. According to the "Mreza" magazine issue of November and December, IBM has about 200 subscribers, BBM about 300, "Iskon" 370, "Hinet" has some 31,000 users, while CARNET has about 35,000. According to the magazine, the speediest provider is "Hinet" with 12 Mbytes toward the United States and two Mbytes toward Italy and Slovenia. The Croatian Telecommunications company has more than 39,000 subscribers to the Internet, said Milena Supe from the Telecommunications public relations office, adding that the number is rising. (hina) ms