 Some portions of the Ebone were sold to other companies and continue to operate today.In 1991 a certain number of research network managers, including Frode Griesen, from Denmark, Kees Neggers, director of the Dutch network SURFNet, and Francois Fluckiger at CERN sought to create a European Internet backbone open to publicly-financed academic networks and private commercial networks.The Ebone consortium was established at the RIPE meeting in Geneva in September 1991, and the network went online in 1992 after the initial IP backbone with 256 kbps links was completed.