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ShareTech U: Research on the Rails
Posted by Robert J. Kohlhepp on April 7, 2006
As their network connections to the Internet and business partners become increasingly bandwidth-intensive, corporations continue to buy and upgrade, enriching only their service providers. And for their most vital business partners, point-to-point networks are provisioned to ensure reliable performance, again at a higher cost.
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Although precious few companies are in a position to deploy and manage their own business networks, educational and government research institutions have bandwidth and performance requirements that go beyond what commercial network providers can supply at reasonable prices. The retail cost for enough bandwidth to handle the data transfers needed for research and experimentation would bankrupt most institutions.
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In response, universities and nonprofits have formed consortia to purchase dark fiber access and build high-speed metropolitan, regional and national optical networks. In addition to 10-Gbps IP network connections, these fiber paths can carry diverse (non-IP) traffic, a capability few conventional ISPs offer. Even better for researchers, the collapse of the telecom market meant much of this fiber could be purchased at deeply discounted rates.
National lambdarail
The most ambitious and high-profile of these endeavors is the National LambdaRail, a large fiber infrastructure capable of connecting more than 25 U.S. cities at speeds in multiples of 10 Gbps. DWDM (dense wave-division multiplexing) lets NLR place multiple wavelengths (referred to as lambdas) on each fiber pair, effectively providing each customer with its own wavelength, equivalent to 10 Gbps of bandwidth, and allowing network provisioning to multiple customers on a single fiber pair.
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