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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... ;)
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.
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.
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).