Internet2 has completed deployment of the first East to West Coast span on its new nationwide 100 Gbps network and is providing production IP and circuit services to the research and education community in the United States. Internet2 is now working to transition traffic from the Abilene Network onto the new platform.
In April 2007, Internet2 announced that the first major phase of the deployment was complete which included nodes in the Northeast and Midwest regions. With today’s announcement, Internet2 and Level 3 have now completed deployment of important nodes across the northern span of the network including those in Washington DC, Chicago, IL, Kansas City, MO, Salt Lake City, UT, and Seattle, WA. Additionally, network rings have been completed from the Washington DC to Atlanta as well as from Kansas City to Atlanta.
Participants in the rollout include Level 3 Communications, the Global Research Network Operations Center (GRNOC) at Indiana University, and the regional network connectors.
Level 3 is deploying Infinera’s Digital Optical Networking equipment across the dedicated high capacity backbone to enable dynamic optical circuit provisioning for the Internet2 community. Internet2 has also partnered with Ciena Corporation to deploy their CoreDirector Multiservice Switch for switching and sub-wavelength grooming services which allows members to customize their connections from 10 Gbps down to 51 Mbps to meet their institutional networking needs. Internet2 will deploy its current Juniper T640 routers to provide advanced IP capabilities.
http://www.internet2.edu
- In November 2006, A demonstration conducted by Finisar, Infinera, Internet2, Level 3 Communications, and University of California at Santa Cruz successfully transmitted a 100GbE signal from Tampa, Florida to Houston, Texas, and back again, over ten 10 Gbps channels through the Level 3 network. The transmission used an Infinera-proposed specification for 100GbE across multiple links. A single Xilinx FPGA implemented this packet numbering scheme and electrically transmitted all ten signals to ten of Finisar’s 10 Gbps XFP optical transceivers, which in turn converted the signals to optics. These signals were then transmitted to an Infinera DTN DWDM system and handed off to Infinera systems within the Level 3 network where it was transmitted across the Level 3 network to Houston and back. The pre-standard specification for 100GbE guaranteed the ordering of the packets and quality of the signal across 10 Gbps wavelengths. Infinera, which is showcasing the technology at this week’s SC06 International Conference in Tampa, said the experiment demonstrated that it is possible for carriers to offer 100GbE services across today’s 10 Gbps infrastructure.
