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

Re:But Why?

[Raindeer]

Ofcourse your joking. :-) And everybody knows MP3's don't take that much bandwidth. Movies do :-)

But yes we do need that bandwidth. Espescially in Research and in Healthcare. I'm now doing some work on hooking up some healthcare organisations to glassfiber. They've done some interesting trials where they have several cameras and sensors looking at the patient, who is performing a walking excercise. The knowledge of the way a person is supposed to walk and the problems associated with that is scattered around the country. For half an hour they watch with several experts from across the country. Every doctor can interact with the patient and with each other. They can point things out to eachother etc. This results in better treatments and the identification of specific problems.

The amount of bandwidth that is needed for this is quite high. 5 to 6 cams with real-time video and real-time sensor read outs and then real-time discussions over multiple locations. Now imagine they do this for multiple patients at the same time :-)

And then ofcourse there was the doctor that asked us if he could send real-time MRI scans to colleagues in the USA. (an estimated 1Gbit+/second):-)

Re:Ping times?

[The Ape With No Name]

As a network administrator at an I2 University, I can tell you that your lamentable ping times are directly attributable to P2P apps. Throw more bandwidth at it? Wrong. We went from 1 DS-3 to 3 DS-3s and it took 2 days for the I2 and Dorm links to become saturated. Traffic analysis showed 75% to 80% of the traffic was FastTrack alone. Turn off your music sharing software and get the sorority girl next door to stop serving up 5000 songs to the world and your will see incredible performance increases. By doing some evil Cisco (the M$ of networking) proprietary tweaks we throttled Kazaa and other Fastrack type stuff and the performance rebounded. What happened next? The Helpdesk starts getting bitches about how slow Kazaa is! To be honest with you, when we get calls from kids complaining about the speeds of their online gaming, we laugh. I always have them read the Acceptible Use Policy and then tell them to get back to studying. We are not the intramural playing fields. Get over it.

But these P2P apps adapt (simply because they are evil) and we are already seeing increases traffic. So guess what? We have to buy more bandwidth. I wonder if Joe Taxpayer likes the idea that his pennies on the dollar toward education go for through bandwidth at a blackhole so kids can playu Quake instead of studying. We roll the 622Mbps link on July 1 with one of those badass Juniper routers ($80000) to boot.