Internet2 Gets a New Backbone

wrong_fuel writes "A few of you know that Internet2 and NLR (National Lambda Rail) have been in talks for some time regarding a merger of the two networks. Those talks have fallen apart and Internet2's contracts with Qwest communications had already been allowed to lapse. Internet2 has now reached an agreement with an unnamed carrier for its next generation backbone. The new network will likely be named later this year (the old one was referred to as "Abilene") and current member Universities will be migrated off of Abilene by September 2007."

Comments

Re:I wish I had some of that speed

[edremy]

How comes you're not there yet?

Because your *country* is quite probably physically smaller than my *state*. The entire land mass of Europe from Iceland to the Ukraine is something like 2.2 million square miles. (Ignoring Russia- they're immense) The US is 3.7 million- even dropping off Alaska we still have about 3.0 million. On a recent trip to Brussels we were talking about the differences in where we lived and I commented that the drive from my home to the airport to fly there was substantially longer than the width of their country.

It's easy to wire a lot of people when you're small and population dense. If I lived near my parents in a much more population dense area, I'd have access to Verizon FIOS at similar speeds and prices to what you list. (Assuming of course you really meant 12*M*bps. I really don't think you'd want to brag about 12*m*bps :^) But I live in the suburbs of a town in central Virginia, and only just got broadband access (1.5Mbps) a year ago after three years of dialup.