On Tuesday at its annual Fall Member Meeting and 10-year anniversary celebration, Internet2 unveiled the first major segment of its new nationwide advanced network. The consortium also announced that NYSERNet, the research and education network consortium serving New York state, has become the first regional network to connect to the new Internet2 Network infrastructure. The new segment, with an initial 100 Gigabit per second capacity between New York, Washington, D.C. and Chicago, marks the first milestone of an ambitious plan to increase the capacity and flexibility of nationwide advanced networking to serve the growing needs of the research and education community.

"The Internet2 community today celebrates both its 10-year history and an important moment in our future," said Douglas Van Houweling, Internet2 president and CEO. "The advanced network our community is creating through collaboration and partnership will serve as a new and even greater platform for discovery, learning and understanding."

During the conference's first general session, Tim Lance, president and CEO of NYSERNet in New York, demonstrated the first application over the new network by providing a presentation to and answering questions from the Internet2 meeting via uncompressed high-definition videoconferencing technology developed by the University of Washington and the ResearchChannel. The videoconference provided the meeting participants in Chicago a detailed tour of the NYSERNet collocation facility and the MAN LAN exchange point in New York City and the network equipment that supports the new Internet2 network.

"NYSERNet is pleased to be the first connector to Internet2's new network," said Dr. Lance. "In the next few months we will also be enabling a dynamic provisioning capability that our DWDM optical infrastructure supports, bringing the full flexibility and power of these resources to all of our members."

In June 2006, in a joint release with Level 3 Communications, Internet2 announced its plan to deploy its new advanced nationwide research network. Level 3 is deploying Infinera's Digital Optical Networking equipment across the infrastructure to enable dynamic optical circuit provisioning. Internet2 has also partnered with Ciena Corporation to deploy the CoreDirector Multiservice Switch for switching and sub-wavelength grooming services. Additionally, Internet2 will deploy its current Juniper T640 routers to provide IP capabilities on the new network. The network, on schedule for full deployment by mid-2007, will support a full range of production IP services as well as new on-demand, dedicated circuits and sub-wavelength services for the most demanding network applications and experimentation.

For instance, the new network provides the capacity for researchers to reliably exchange terabyte-scale data sets in seconds, or the flexibility to allocate smaller bandwidth for network research. The dynamic capabilities and carrier-class reliability of the new network were influential factors in the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network's (ESnet) decision to use the new Internet2 infrastructure for its next-generation ESnet4 network in support of energy science physicists and researchers around the country.

Bill Johnston, head of ESnet at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said, "Researchers around the country that collaborate using the ESnet facilities are demanding networks that provide high reliability, in addition to very high bandwidth to support their critical work in scientific discovery. The Internet2 infrastructure will provide these capabilities now and with its leading-edge technology can easily scale to meet the energy science community's future needs as well."

As a part of the Fall Member Meeting, the new Internet2 network will also support a first-ever 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) transmission demonstration across a national research network. The demonstration, created by a team led by Infinera in collaboration with Finisar, Level 3 and the University of California at Santa Cruz highlights the flexibility and reconfigurability of the new Internet2 infrastructure. The demo also underscores how the network can be used as a testbed for new network paradigms, protocols, and architectures to push the envelope of networking technology.

Steve Cotter, Internet2 director of network services added, "With the latest advances in semiconductor devices like field-programmable gate arrays, we might see supercomputers connected at 100 GbE using 10 parallel 10 Gbps circuits in the not-so-distant future. The community control, reliability and flexibility of the new Internet2 network makes it ideal for testing and developing these kinds of new networking technologies."