About

The National Association of Internet Service Providers in Romania (ANISP) is a professional, non-governmental, non-profit organization, consisting of natural and legal persons, in accordance with the legislation in force on associations and foundations.

ANISP was established and registered on the 31st of January, 2001 at the initiative of 12 of the most important ISPs of the moment: Dynamic Network Technologies (DNT) SRL, EuroWeb Romania SA, FX Internet SA, Global One Communication Romania SA (Equant / Orange Business Services), GTS Romania SRL (GTS Telecom), IIRUC- Digicom Grup SA (RoLink Plus), Kappa Servexim SRL (Astral telecom / UPC Romania), Logic Telecom SA, Mobifon SA (Vodafone Romania) Romania Data System SA (RCS-RDS), Total Net SA.

Over time, over 80 telcos have become members and / or associate members of ANISP.

The main purpose of setting up ANISP was and remained “to promote and support the interests of providers of electronic communications services/networks (including ISPs)” in Romania.

The founding members and then the whole community supported the legally empowered bodies (Ministry of Communications, Parliament, the Regulatory Authority, various state agencies) in promoting the appropriate legislative framework and bringing it to the European Union standards in developing and implementing strategies for the sustainable development of information technologies in general and especially electronic / Internet communications.

During the year 2005, ANISP initiated a discussion program with the local authorities of the Bucharest munitions, which aimed to establish a metropolitan fiber optic network for telecommunication. Based on some of the requirements supported by ANISP, with other significant organizations and operators, the municipality leadership has developed a set of specifications for the realization of the NETCITY metropolitan fiber optic network in order to ensure the further development of the sector electronic communications services, eliminating the possibility of creating artificial barriers. At the request of ANISP a consultative council was set up with the participation of all stakeholders, where discussions were held to identify problems and find appropriate solutions.

At the same time, ANISP has asked the Ministry of Communications and Information Society and the Communications Regulatory Authority to engage in establishing a new regulatory framework for access to associated infrastructure elements for electronic communications network operators (access to land and buildings, poles , sewerage, etc.), which led to the elaboration of the draft law for the electronic communications network infrastructure regime.

The Association has collaborated with the ministry at the elaboration and implementation of the National Strategy for the Building of Information Society. He has also been involved in the debates organized by the ministry and Parliament’s Specialty Commission (CTIC) to complete the regulatory framework with a number of legislative acts in complementary areas of electronic communications, such as:

• Electronic signature (Law No. 455 of July 18, 2001);
• personal data processing and privacy protection in the telecommunications sector (Law No. 676 of November 21, 2001);
• the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and the free movement of such data (Law No. 677 of November 21, 2001);
• e-commerce (Law No. 365 of June 7, 2002);
• some measures to ensure transparency in the exercise of public dignity, public functions and business environment, prevention and punishment of corruption (Law No. 161 of 19 April 2003 – TITLE III: Prevention and Combating Cybercrime);
• the functioning of the Single National Emergency Call System (Law No. 398 of June 14, 2002 for the approval of Government Ordinance No. 18 of 2002);
• Audiovisual (Law 504 of 2002);
• Electronic collection of local taxes and fees (Law 291/2002 approving Government Emergency Ordinance no. 24/2002);
• public procurement through electronic auctions (Ordinance No. 20/2002);
• registration of commercial transactions by electronic means – the legal regime of electronic documents (LAW No. 260 of July 19, 2007).

Through its involvement in these approaches, ANISP pursued:

• Creating a trustworthy environment in the information society and promoting online security-based applications;
• ensuring a stable legislative environment, conducive to the development of the information society and the digital economy;
• the intense promotion of information infrastructure and access to infrastructure through the creation of competitive markets, especially the market for electronic communications services;
• ensuring qualitative and quantitative analyzes, a flexible and pragmatic guide to maximize the benefits of public and private shareholders through the use of information technology in the Romanian economy.

ANISP has also been involved in supporting the interest of the network operators and electronic communications services community in a number of related issues, such as:

– developing methodologies for using musical works such as ringtones for mobile phones and the Internet and patrimonial rights for copyright holders;
– discouraging other central and local authorities to impose the overtaxing of electronic communications (for example, the Ministry of Culture requested in 2005 operators to support 5% of the national cultural fund’s turnover, as a result of the sustained intervention of ANISP, it regulation has been withdrawn);
– request the Government of Romania not to establish regulations affecting the field of electronic communications without consulting the representatives of the sector and the relevant ministry (for example, Law 123/2005 amending and completing the Law 8/1996 on copyright and related rights included provisions for providers of electronic communications networks and services without having been able to say their point of view).

On July 1, 2009 ANISP became a member of EuroISPA, the pan-European organization of ISPs national associations. In this way, ANISP joined the most authoritative “voices” that support the electronic communications industry, especially the Internet.

In this capacity, ANISP, together with the other EuroISPA member organizations, was involved in the debate and elaboration of the position papers on the most important issues regarding the development and the good functioning of the electronic communications sector, which were supported in the dialogue with the European institutions, as follows:

• TELECOM package – elaboration of the new regulatory framework in the field of electronic communications at EU level;
• Data Protection;
• Data Retention;
• Liability of intermediaries;
• Intelectual Properties Rights / Copyright;
• Cybercrime;
• Safer Internet.

In most of the initiatives aimed at the development of the Information Society in Romania, ANISP has collaborated with other IT & C associations, in this respect noting the concerted actions under the “Coalition Tech 21” logo designed and implemented with CIPE Romania support.

An important project is the building of RoNIX – Romania Network for Internet eXchange, which allows the routing of Internet traffic between ISP networks. Thus, starting with September 7, 2001, ANISP designed and installed a platform for the interconnection of the main electronic communications networks in Romania in order to interchange traffic.

RoNIX managed to decrease the traffic on international channels as well as to increase the speed of the local traffic, which led to an increase in the quality of national services. At this moment RoNIX – Romania Network for Internet eXchange has several nodes forming a ring with ports up to 100 Gbps (Ethernet or optical).

What brought RoNIX to the electronic communications sector (especially the Internet):

• Savings on the international bandwidth;
• Lower prices for ISP and consequently – for end users.
• Service quality. The network response speed increased, allowing development of applications that require minimal round-trip time.
• Easier maintenace (with the decrease in the number of peer to peer connections between ISPs).
• Increased reliability.

Through RoNIX, ANISP became a member of EURO-IX, the European Internet Exchange Organization.

On September 3, 2004, the equipment installed at the RoNIX metropolitan node in Bucharest was set up and became operational, which ensures the functioning of a copy of the i.root-servers “root server” domain name, the first top-level DNS server outside the US space. From now on, for all members of the Romanian Network for Internet eXchange, the access to the “i.root-servers” site has become active. This service provides a link between users and Internet routing infrastructure, associating domain names that are much easier to remember and used, IP addresses used by communications equipment and used in the Internet routing system, and vice versa.