NICE stands for National Host Interconnection Experiments. It is a project which provides validated configurations for use by the National Hosts and their customers. To prove and demonstrate these configurations NICE builds and operates the infrastructure for selected conferences and meetings distributed over ATM.
Background
The project is part of the ACTS Programme, it started in January 1996 and its consortium includes most National Hosts as members.
NICE partners are:
Supporting institutions are:
National Hosts, validated configurations and Applications Support Functions
The National Host structure has been set up by the European Commision to provide co-ordinated access to broadband network infrastructure and services for collaborative R&D projects in advanced communications. It is a consortia of industry, network operators, research institutes, and universities, set up in order to provide technical infrastructure, laboratory equipment and consultancy, needed to meet user requirements. More details on National Hosts are available here.
Validated configurations means defined sets of equipment and telecommunications services together with tools and procedures to install, test and support generic apllications support functions.
Applicatins Support Functions (ASFs) are generic functions, which are used to support particular applications:
For example, one needs a broad set of ASFs, such as multimedia e-mail, high speed file transfer, multipoint video- and audioconference, application sharing, application management etc., to support a broadband distributed teleconferencing application.
The term ASF is related to the term services with latter being broader, since it has to include some other aspects such as pricing and quality of service.
For further information refer to 
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