Intenet2 Backbone Upgrades

An anonymous reader "Looks like Abilene, the backbone for Internet2 will join Canada's CA*Net3 and Europe's GEANT as one of the fastest research networks on the planet. According to this press release, Internet2 will be deploying 11 of Juniper network's freshly announced T640 platform. These puppies can cram 32 OC-192 (or 128 OC-48) interfaces into a single chassis. All in half a rack, too!" I'm sure those students are very happy with their ping times. Meanwhile in the real world... ;)

Comments

I love CA*Net3

[jordan_a]

My University is on it, and when I download from ftp.crc.ca (they mirror many things) I max out at 10Mbps.. Now if I could only get Acadia to upgrade to 100Mbps on the lan. *sigh*

Microsoft & Internet2

[inKubus]

You know, Microsoft is on Internet2. They have a site, research.microsoft.com that's stuck on it (which routes to them internally). I always wondered why I could hit 1meg a second to windowsupdate.microsoft.com from the campus I used to work at... Then I found out.

Re:Microsoft & Internet2

[Turmio]

The fact that Microsoft is connected to Internet2 doesn't give you 1meg/s transfer speed from windowsupdate.

They have probably hunderds of mirrors around the world where the actual wares is downloaded from, you're automatically redirected to the closest one.

Works pretty fine here, they have one mirror in the same facility as where the Finnish University and Research Network backbone is located, this gives me 4-5meg/s transfer speed from windowsupdate to my dorm at the campus of Helsinki University of Technology :)

Re:Microsoft & Internet2

[BeBoxer]

Actually, your traffic never even makes it to I2 at all. The "Maxgigapop" or "Mid-Atlantic Crossroads" is a regional aggregation point for I2 members. Both your school (which is in DC) and UMD (in Maryland obviously) connect to the MAX, and the MAX has a link to I2. But in your case, the traffic never has to go all the way to I2. Which explains the crazy-low ping times. The packets basically never even leave town (which is why regional aggregation points are good.) Try a traceroute to some schools on the west coast, and you will see ping times which have some measurable delay in them (due largely to the speed of light).

CAnet3

[John_Steed]

Has sweet bandwidth allright, but you cant use it for anything out side the research network. So all those napster type progies wont get a bit of it, and its also not that usefull for general surfing. however, my friend sucked down a redhat iso in 12 minutes From The NRC's ftp to his machine in @ Carleton U.

More regions get connected

[rutger21]

Looks like Abilene, the backbone for Internet2 will join Canada's CA*Net3 and Europe's GEANT as one of the fastest research networks on the planet

According to this page at Geante,

An important element of GÉANT is the development of connectivity with equivalent Research Networks in other world regions. Connectivity is being consolidated with the existing equivalents of GÉANT in North America (Abilene, CA*net) and in Asia-Pacific (SINET, KOREN, SingAREN) and developed further between Europe and the Asia-Pacific, North American, South American and Mediterranean regions

a bunch of extra regions get connected as well.

Re:Actually, students don't get access to I2

[zerofunk]

I'm on the campus resnet at my school, and any traffic that goes to another *.edu (for the most part) is routed through internet2 which is very nice. However, my dorm only has 10mbps hubs in the building, and the bandwidth usage and collisions on the hub can get so bad (which is quite often) that it really doesn't matter what size pipe is carrying data off campus. It's always nice when you can ping internet and internet2 sites at under 100ms.

Traffic that goes over Ca*Net3 = (surprise!) KaZaA

[_repressor_]

I've been living on-campus at a canadian university for 2 years now and only recently discovered how amazing the research network is. (Our regular commercial line is really slow, slow enough to prompt the luckier, and geekyer, residents with TV to get cable internet in addition to the residence internet.)

If you check out the traffic graphs, you can see that well over half the traffic is kazaa. (click on application-bits)

http://205.189.33.73/www/flowscan/nrc.html

Taxpayers' dollars hard at work indeed! The cool thing is that at most times these nodes aren't anywhere near their maximum data transfers at any time that I check them. That's probably just because nobody really knows about it and only use it if they happen to connect to someone else on the network and their university has the routing setup correctly... Also, not all the universities in Canada I've connected to make full use of the network, some limit bandwidth to their users even on this "free" (gov't subsidized) network. From what I hear though, the free part will soon change and the universities/gov't offices will have to pay for it in the upcoming years, but right now it's basically free bandwidth for those on the network.

Microsoft's location on I2

[amemily]

For those who are curious, here is a map of the PNW gigapop connections that shows where research.microsoft.com and www.microsoft.com is on the internet. Microsoft is on the left, and I2 is on the right.

And for the poster who said Microsoft was not on I2, here is a press release stating that Microsoft was joining I2 in 1999.

Re:Ping times?

[zyklone]

To Quest it seems the link is an OC-48.
There is probably transit through a few of the other ISPs also though.

There is much more than 10gbps bandwidth over the atlantic. In 2001 it was esimted there was 200gbps lit fibre.

Re:Whoops! sorry....

[Phizzy]

No, No and NO.

First, these (and all core routers) have redundant power supplies. Second, the cords are screw-down DC power, which aren't going anywhere. Third, the front-panel throughput is a measure of how much traffic the line cards (ports on which all data enters and exits the router) can push, whereas the rear-panel throughput is a measure of how much the backplane can push between the (8) different line cards.

//Phizzy

capacity vs speed

[glitch23]

Remember that bandwidth is the measure of the width of the pipe (common sense, right?) so a fiber line can *carry* more data at once but not send the individual packets any faster to their destination.

speed= distance/time

bandwidth = data-amount/time

You will always have latency even with fat pipes, mainly due to speed of light constraints which other people have already mentioned.

Re:The hay days of networking

[Zamfi]

I onced did a traceroute to www.ucla.edu from a computer lab on campus during the middle of the day during the middle of the week and got amazing results. I found that there was only 8 hops between that desktop and the webserver that was in CA somewhere and all ping responses were less than 10ms. Talk about insane.

Hmm...I2 is now...faster than light! Tear down the front page!

10 ms from VA to CA is about 3000 miles in 10 ms. That's information traveling round-trip (6000 miles!) in 10 ms, or 600000 miles/second.

Approximately 3.5 times the speed of light. Now that's impressive.

Let's not get carried away here. :)

Re:DWDM ?

[bonoboy]

The Internet Backbone is kind of an old idea. I mean the main centres are still there, but many modern ISPs are meshing their networks quite densely. The telco-based old guys are still sitting there refusing to peer with anyone, but those that are meshing up are making for a much more stable Internet, the way it was originally intended. Just try knocking the thing over when half the large ISPs are linked to each other at diverse points. If chunks of the Internet disappear, a few phone calls are made and peering agreements briefly become transit agreements. No more problem.

That being said, I'm in Australia, and our speeds are alot slower than most in our backbone networks. But I know for a fact that Verio US has 192 fairly well deployed. Down here we're nowhere near that. I know a few years ago, Optus was running STM16s (OC48) so they might be close now. Mind you I don't think they've sold so much bandwidth that they'd have gone that far yet.