CARNet is the Croatian Academic and Research Network.
The network was founded in 1991 by the ministry of science and technology, and the institution officially came to life in 1995 when the government decreed so.
CARNet's mission is to "provide the infrastructure, knowledge and the necessary resources to individuals and organizations that wish to build Croatia as an information society".
CARNet's activities include the development and maintenance of the national academic network system, connecting with international networks, building network infrastructure within the country, and everything else that involves IT.
The local DNS database (.hr), CERT, the fledgling Internet eXchange point and NTP servers are all maintained by CARNet. CARNet maintains and connects the internets for four universities and all other government-funded or non-profit organizations in the country.
The core of the network in Zagreb is 10GE; the backbone links between six major sites/cities are STM-1; the other links vary, but most of them are E1s.
The international connection is a pair of STM-4 links to the local GÉANT PoP.
CARNet is also an ISP for the academic community (professors, students etc) and maintains all the resources a typical ISP does, like a news server (NNTP), IRC servers, FTP servers, mailing lists, LDAP directories, PGP keyrings, and even a small national search engine.
They also maintain the "first" web page in the country, www.hr.
For more information (albeit not too useful if you don't speak the language), visit http://www.carnet.hr/