Slashdot Mirror
Internet2 and National LambdaRail To Merge
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has the story on the rapproachment of the two main US providers of high-speed networks to academic and research institutions: Internet2 and National LambdaRail have agreed to merge. And they're moving quickly, after tussling over the details of such an agreement for more than a year. The two groups have decided to put final merger documents before their respective boards by April 20, with merger completion to take place by June 29."
As far as I know, what most people call "internet2" is actually the Abilene network, which is a university/corporate cooperation to build a large backbone network between all of the universities for use with data transfer. this gives the added benefit to students at those universities, because they can transfer data over the abilene network at the same high speeds. it's a standard internet backbone using IP. the reason why people get internet2 and abilene confused is due to the file sharing that students were doing (RIAA got involved, shit met fan).
national lambdarail is slightly different. it's an ethernet network connecting all of the universities. and by ethernet, i mean OSI layer 1/2 are defined, the rest is up in the air. this means it CAN be used as an IP backbone, but its main purpose is to experiment in large scale networks (researching replacements for IP, for example, or experimenting with WDM over fiber).
now, internet2 and national lambdarail are kind of intertwined, which is why this merger is rather unexciting. internet2 (the creators of the abilene network) are a part of the national lambdarail project. not only that, national lambdarail and abilene intersect at regional university interconnects such as the front range gigapop (where the university of colorado and UCAR link in) and CENIC/CalREN (where places like stanford, berkeley, and cal-tech link in).
so really, to joe sixpack, who thinks internet2 is some kind of secret research network, and has never heard of national lambdarail, this seems like some kind of mysterious and intellectual coup on the intertubes, when in truth it's barely newsworthy.