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."

Comments

Space, bandwidth, and digging holes.

[RealProgrammer]

From TFPDF:

• Our (and Cornell's) affiliated hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian, has a significantly larger leased ATM infrastructure at DS-3 and OC-3 rates interconnecting about a dozen buildings. We were separately and collectively paying a lot for bandwidth in Manhattan.

  • 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.