The story
Founded by Government of Croatia in 1991.1
The institution
A body responsible for coordinating the establishment of the Croatian educational computer network has been established on 3 October 1991. That was the beginning of the work of the Croatian Academic and Research Network - CARNET, the first Internet service provider (ISP) in Croatia. In the several years that followed CARNET was the only ISP in Croatia, providing the service free of charge, not only to the academic community, but to all citizens of the Republic of Croatia as well.
In November 1992 the first international communication connection was established, which connected CARNET Internet exchange point in Zagreb to Austria. By that act Croatia became a part of the world computer network – the Internet.
During 1992, the first equipment was procured and the backbone of the CARNET network was built. Institutions in Croatia were connected at the speed of 19 - 200 kbit/s, while the whole network was connected to the Internet through Austria at the speed of 64 kbit/s.
The first institutions to be connected to the Internet were the University Computing Centre - SRCE, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb (FER), Ruđer Bošković Institute (IRB), Faculty of Science (PMF), the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture in Split, the Faculty of Engineering in Rijeka, the Faculty of Economics in Osijek and the Ministry of Science and Technology.
During the first months of 1993, CARNET was assigned the administration over the top-level.hr domain by the international organisation called the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
In October 1994, CARNET started offering the first Internet courses to its users and, in time, user education became one of CARNET’s most important activities.
Network
In 1996, the backbone of CARNET network was upgraded by introducing the ATM technology which enables real-time transfer of image and sound at the basic speed of 155 Mbit/s.
In January 1997, the first distance lecture in Croatia was organized through the CARNET ATM core between the Rectorate of the Osijek University and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb.
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GÉANT, the pan-European academic and research network, was put into service on 1 December 2001, and CARNET, among others, connected to it.
In cooperation with the University Computing Centre - SRCE, in 2003 CARNET released the Giga CARNET project in order to use gigabit technologies to develop a high quality infrastructure for CARNET member institutions, faculties and research institutes. In the framework of the Giga CARNET project, in February 2004 CARNET was enabled, through the connection to the GÉANT network, to have a twice-faster connection to similar academic and research networks in Europe and all over the world (at the speed of 1.2 Gbit/s instead of the former 622 Mbit/s).
As a necessary requirement for further cooperation between CARNET and the world's academic and research communities, in June 2007 the speed of CARNET's connection towards the GÉANT network was increased to 10 Gbit/s.
Chronology
2020 Cyberattack
On 16 March, Minister of Education Blaženka Divjak confirmed that the same day CARNET, responsible for online classes in Croatia, was a victim of a cyberattack making the online classes impossible at that moment.
From Wikipedia’s article on CARNET, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4