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NYC's Educational Dark Fiber Network
An anonymous reader submits "A group of educational leaders in New York City has created a new fiber backbone network off previously layed but unused fiber. Connecting many city NYSERNet members (the Museum of Natural History, CUNY, Mt. Sinai-NYU Medical, Cornell Med., Columbia Med., and Columbia's primary campus), the newly activated backbone connects to Internet2 and commodity Internet and intends to be largely used for video streaming. Original plan info here."
intends to be largely used for video streaming.
*Wink wink*
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
"and intends to be largely used for video streaming"
is intended to be
bloody yanks
How many instances of this are there across the US/world? Unused fiber? Find some for me!
In rural Illinois we just run cable up the Interstate or build another series of attractive microwave towers when bandwidth gets short.
The problems of running a network, and a university for that matter, in a metropolis such as New York or Chicago are completely different. We have lots of cheap space but very little infrastructure, while they have too much infrastructure and hardly any space.
We just dig a hole and lay cable; in NYC all the holes have already been taken.
sigs, as if you care.
intends to be largely used for video streaming.
You misspelled sharing.
I misread that one at first. The first thoughts that come running through me are that first /. puts the word scrotum on the front page and now this?
most of the cost of running fiber anywhere is backhoe. once you've dug a trench, the cost implications for adding double the amount of fiber/cable you actually need is negligible - so you put loads in to allow for future expansion. this extra fiber just sits there until it's needed, or until other fiber breaks and is swapped over to the spare capacity...
Ya know... in the US we have slower bandwidth than most of the other tech countries of the world. It's not for lack of the fiber being there. It's more controls on the speeds so when they increase it a little we compare it to ourselves not what else is out there.
Glad to see someone using some of it for somethign productive.
Evolution or ID?
what kind of video gets streamed from a natural history museum to a hospital? More seriously, here in Denmark, the electricity companies want to get in on the game, but nobady really knows where all that fiber got dumped during the bubble. One company ordered fiber along a road, and then found out there was already dark fiber: the company they asked to dig the trenches had also dug the previous ones. If it was me, I would have kept my mouth shut, but then again...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Having dark capacity isn't surprising when you look at the economics.
1. Cost of laying a single strand of fiber: $12,000,000 NewYenRubles
2. Cost of laying 24 strands of fiber:
$12,000,001 NewYenRubles
At the time I worked for the local DOT, they laid 22 odd strands of fiber down the major highways in town, and used the revenue generated from selling off fiber to halp fund the project. It's good for the DOT as it lowers costs, and it's good for Telco/ISP/whoever because they don't have to dig a seonc trench, obtain permission, rip up roads again, etc.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Nudge, nudge, know what I mean, say no more!
Man: Well, I mean like,... you've SLEPT, with a lady...
Squire: Yes...
Man: What's it like?
sigs, as if you care.
Yep. Life is fair.
It would be the latter.
The same thing is happening in western Massachusetts to connect The Five Colleges (Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst).
Monterey County CA, the maintenance guys were looking in some "unmarked" panels in the basement in the Salinas offices, and "found" about 200 strands of dark fiber. Apparently during the reign of one of the iterations of our local cable service (TCI/AT&T/Comcast, AT&T did it I know it :), they "knew" that fiber was the future and laid fiber all over the place, then they sold out to comcast without hooking any of it up.
:)
Montery started by connecting to schools and cities down the 101 highway, when MCOE lost antenna space for their educational television feed, they ran it down the fiber backbone, without causing any lag in any of the connections. So now places that were running 56k frame relays are now flying with 45mb to their router. They actually have a bigger connection than my isp
I just need a small space, near the router, I will stand, I don't need a chair, I just want to FEEL the bandwidth, please?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Built from dark fiber once owned by Avista Utilities before they spun off the telecom stuff and, specifically, the fiber to Columbia Fiber Solutions. (Also includes a couple of leased OC-3 lines.) Been in planning for a couple of years and back in September had the ceremonial launch and press event. It's all gigabit networking between the core routers in each node (except for the aforementioned OC-3 lines). Connects all the major educational institutions in the area as well as several research and commercial firms. As of right now, all the fiber is lit and the core routers are connected. Some sites (like the one I work at) are still waiting for network drops to be made from the router to the computer labs (red tape...). Should have an Internet2 connection as soon as another project (something Gigapop, my memory's a bit fuzzy on that) is completed in the next year or so.
Eastern Washington University, Cheney
Eastern Washington University, Spokane at Riverpoint
Gonzaga University
Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS)
Intercollegiate College of Nursing, WSU College of Nursing
North Idaho College
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
Community Colleges of Spokane (Spokane Community College)
Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute (SIRTI)
Spokane Public Schools
University of Idaho
University of Idaho, Research Park, Post Falls
Washington State University, Pullman
Washington State University, Spokane
Whitworth College
Website: http://www.vpnet.org (a little bland at the moment, but still good info).
Does anybody know of any resources or maps concerning the location and availability of dark fiber? I am sure there is a great deal of it laying out there along the roadside, in the sewers, and under the sidewalks just waiting for an application. Unfortunately, it's a pain in the ass to find out who owns what, and who to contact in your area. Some maps or perhaps a dark fiber market would be nice. Any suggestions?
that makes the MPAA and RIAA wet themselves.
WH00T!
Despite the fact that several bidders offered to lease us their unused installed fiber we got a better price, better engineering, and better quality of fiber (SMF28e low water peak) by having brand new fiber installed. I have a map that shows me exactly where my fiber goes. (No, I can't share it with you.)
I work for Columbia as a sys admin and have been anticipating this for months. It's sure gonna beat our unreliable microwave link from the main campus. As it is, the current connection is pretty fast. I can download a full 700Meg .iso in under 10 minutes. I have a feeling after becoming jaded on the i2, the 3Mb/s cable modem at home is going to feel like 2400 baud!
So "dark fiber" is not really the correct word here. BTW, I have NEVER seen the article's definition for dark fiber used before, I have always seen it used to describe the excess unlit fiber that is always installed when someone runs fiber. As many earlier posters pointed out, in most situations (especially long-haul ones that involve digging), the cost of running 100 fibers instead of one is insignificant compared to the cost of digging a hole to install the fiber in.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
is there any indication that the discovery of this so-called 'dark fiber' could change our understanding of if the universe will end in a singularity or endless expansion?
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Yes "dark" is the right term. It means no telco is lighting it with their SONET or whatever equipment and then selling me a managed service. We have 20-year rights to several strands of actual glass end-to-end which we can light with whatever we want. We could send morse code by flashlight (torch for the bloody UK poster:-) but instead we chose to start with 10 gigabit Ethernet. I think the term you are looking for describing previsouly laid and unproductive fiber is "distressed assets." ;-)
NYSERnet (New York State Educaction and Research network) was the only provider for my school in Rochester, NY. Our packets ended up routed through some awful Sprintlink drop in Washington DC before they went anywhere. That sprintlink drop had all kinds of problems, high latency, bad routing to pretty much everywhere, and would occasionally just stop forwarding packets.
:(
NYSERnet may be fine for those organizations in NYC, but for upstate, it really sucked.
They went through some upgrades in the past couple years, so hopefully things have gotten better. But NYSERnet really is a sore subject for me. It ruined many a Quake game.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
What is the "commodity Internet" ??!
Feel the power of the Dark Fiber,
Luke I am your father...
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/14/0 314253
Heck, they're probably paying for this as their own backdoor into I2. They've been trying to get in hard enough otherwise.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If you wade through the piles of documentation, it looks like they've got dark fiber routes from each of the participants to racks at a couple of hub locations where they can meet with each other and Nysernet and also crossconnect to other carriers at a carrier-neutral facility. That means they could be running whatever combination they want of DWDM or CWDM, 10 Gig Ether, 1 Gig Ether, or traditional SONET (155 Mbps x 1,4,16,64) depending on how much they want to spend on CPE. I couldn't tell how many fiber pairs they were deploying per customer, but they're using fairly new high-end fiber that supports almost anything. The cheapest way to light up the stuff is with GigE fiber connections, since you can get by with a pretty small router, and cheap cards for short-distance hops, but CWDM is coming down in price (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing doesn't get as many channels per fiber as Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, but the hardware's a lot cheaper) so you should be able to run multiple GigEs or whatever else you feel like. It looks like hardware costs for the CWDM versions are on the order of $5-10K per FDX GigE channel.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't understand. What kind of experments are they doing on "The Internet 2"? The design is already set in stone right? So what they have now is a faster network...and?
From here it just looks like a big toy.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I like a little dark fiber and milk in the morning. Helps me poop.