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CenturyLink Providing DoD's Equivalent of Internet2
Nerval's Lobster writes "Network provider CenturyLink has won a $750 million contract from the Department of Defense to network the latter's sites together as part of the military equivalent of Internet2. The contract calls for CenturyLink to connect as many as 150 DoD locations nationwide with a dedicated high-speed fiber-optic network, with speeds ranging from 50 Mbits/s to up to 100 Gbits/sec. Given that the contract also calls for the telco to deploy Ethernet, IP and optical services, it's likely that the 50-Mbits/s threshold is a per-user basis, with site-to-site communications in the gigabit range. It's all part of the U.S. Department of Defense's High Performance Computing Modernization Program (DoD HPCMP), which aims to solve complicated and time-consuming problems with massively-parallel computing and very high-speed networking. The HPCMP program was formed in 1992, with the aim of connecting what had been separate facilities and test labs developed and maintained by the Army, Navy, and Air Force. That network is known as the Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) network, which currently uses an OC-48 optical network providing 2.4 Gbit/s between facilities, according to the military."
Oh good, now they might fix my extra 60ms latency, and frequent disconnects. Or not. I wonder if the military will get better.
all i can say is...
good luck with that.
...flipping off most of their residential users with their substandard 1.5mbps connections while charging an arm and a leg and whining about Google Fiber coming along and making them look bad. Fuck CenturyLink...
And all I get is 1.5mbps DSL because they are still using ancient copper out in my neck of the woods. C'mon... PLEASE.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
I object. Sounds more like Internet 1.2.
If the military's current network gets 2.4Gb/sec, I wonder how Google Fiber is offering 1Gb/sec to end users for such a low rate? How are they getting all this data to the backbone, and how are they actually getting 1Gb/sec to these people? Are they just touting the interface speed knowing that it won't be utilized to just scare the larger ISPs and manipulate the market?
Sig: I stole this sig.
2.4Gbit/sec used to be a big deal, now it is not
The backbones are all 100+Gbit/sec (often 10x10Gbit/sec or multiple 40Gbit/sec interfaces)
My business routinely moves 20-30Gbit/sec of data around the internet (video streaming) and during large events, we can do 100Gbit/sec for a few hours.
1Gbps is the customer handoff. The aggregate connections are oversubscribed, just like every other provider's network on the planet. Let me reiterate this so it's clear: every. single. provider. on the planet has oversubscribed their network. To not do so would be the height of idiocy and financial irresponsibility.
...about how U.S. national security is threatened by hackers on "Internet 1"!
The next time the NSA or FBI or DHS or DoD rolls out the argument in favor of deeper inspection and control of traffic on the civilian Internet, this "Internet2" is the proof that the government can (and should!) operate without interfering with (or being interfered by) civilian communications.
And putting the controls for our power grid on the Internet is so self-evidently stupid that it seems like it must have been intentionally done to provide additional excuse for attempts to snoop upon, and control, traffic on the Internet. Won't someone please think of the children...err, helpless power grids!
Why is it called internet2 if they are only upgrading the cables?
it was supposed to be called SkyNet!
Because your home network isn't plugged into $100K+ routers with the military's availability SLAs.
Once upon a time the militry classes PGP as a weapon "US export regulations regarding cryptography remain in force, but were liberalized substantially throughout the late 1990s. Since 2000, compliance with the regulations is also much easier. PGP encryption no longer meets the definition of a non-exportable weapon, and can be exported internationally except to seven specific countries and a list of named groups and individuals[14] (with whom substantially all US trade is prohibited under various US export controls)." via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy So, I wonder if they also class this fast fibre offering from Google as a weapon?
100 Gbits/sec? Does that even exist?! What kind of hardware you need to achieve those speeds?!
Well, the ROI has to include kickbacks...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are they also going to require the DOD to buy a POTS network to go with their their data network an charge them for both?
So first off, there are different kinds of fiber. The FTTH stuff you tend to see is PON, passive optical network. You can look on Wikipedia for a pretty good article on the details but more or less it is a shared type of connection where everyone is on the same connection. A Point to multipoint kind of deal. Well, that costs less than doing direct point-to-point fiber as you see in backbones. The downside is, of course, you are all sharing the same bandwidth. If there's 100 people on one line you all share the bandwidth (via TDMA usually). Same basic idea as cable modems.
The other thing then is oversubscribing the backhaul. When a provider gives you cheap 1 gpbs fiber, they aren't providing backhaul all the way up the chain to make sure you 1 gbps no matter what. They oversubscribe at every level. So say there's 100 people on your segment. That's 100:1 oversubscription right there. That then connects back to a datacenter and, say, 30 other segments connect to a switch, which has a 10 gbps uplink to the core. Now you are 3000:1. The core then only has so much out to the higher level of the network as so on.
Now that works fine for users. If you've ever worked in a big office environment or university it is the same way. You might have gig to your desktop, then that switch with 24 people only has gig to the floor switch, which only has gig to the main switch, and then only a gig off to the Internet. However it still can be fast. Reason is that you don't all use your connections full bore all the time. You get some data, and then it sits idle. So long as people play nice and share, it can be fast despite the oversubscription and still be cheap.
However that's a real cost difference than backbone lines. Taking something like the DoD's network where it is a dedicated OC-48 connection from each site back to some central infrastructure, and probably then larger lines between the different infrastructure sites, well that is a bunch more money.
Now as someone pointed out the DoD's net is also outdated, but there are also real cost differences for different levels of service. Also shit gets more expensive in an exponential fashion as bandwidth goes up. Getting a switch fabric that handles a few gigabits of traffic is easy. You can get a lil' 24 port 10/100 switch for like $70. You want gig? Still pretty cheap, $180ish. Ok how about 10 gig? That's more like $8000 and it doesn't even have interfaces in it, you'll have to buy SPF+ units for each port. 100gig? I don't even know, those are the "call us for pricing" kinds of switches. Easily 6 figures or more for 24 ports.
Gig technology is pretty cheap these days, so you can provide it to end users pretty cheap... so long as you do plenty of sharing on the backhaul.
Now when you think about what the military's networks are, you've got:
MILNET that came out of ARPANET and remained the military portion of it.the Nonclassified Internet Protocol Router Network subnets of the internet
SIPRNet which is the "Secure Internet Protocol Router Network", a separate-from but parallel-to the regular internet network used by the military for secure comms to transmit classified information.
So I'm guessing that the military's Internet2 is going to be a 100Gbit fiber at the ends network which is being deployed by whomever to allow for a SIPRnet-like secure communication channel for classified information over a parallel-network which is separate from (and securely separate from) the regular internet and the "regular" Internet2 accessible to universities created by the internet2 consortium. So like Internet2, but more secure and separate.
Good luck with that, DOD. CenturyLink *sucks*.
Thats ridiculous. The DoD has been working for over 15 years getting 100Mbit per desktop.
Where I worked they were focusing on 10Gbit to the desktop.
Last I heard the DoD network was looking for Terabit speeds for site to site connections.
100 Gbit would be saturated by just two HPC centers with normal traffic.
Did they really go to all of this trouble to impersonate the title Anonymous Coward?
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
If the military's current network gets 2.4Gb/sec, I wonder how Google Fiber is offering 1Gb/sec to end users for such a low rate? How are they getting all this data to the backbone, and how are they actually getting 1Gb/sec to these people? Are they just touting the interface speed knowing that it won't be utilized to just scare the larger ISPs and manipulate the market?
Google's Fiber, Verizon's FIOS, and other consumer-grade fiber services are still a "buffet style" internet connection. You're not guaranteed any level of bandwidth, you have (in Google's case) a 1Gig uplink from the customer premise to the ISP's network. At that point your traffic gets tossed in a "pipe" along with everyone else, and the actual speeds you get will vary based on how big those aggregate "pipes" are and how much the other subscribers are using.
The military networks, as well as dedicated commercial-grade fiber circuits, are dedicated bandwidth. If you pay for 1gig, you've got 1 gig reserved for your circuit even if you're not using it. But you can end up paying some pretty hefty prices for such services. The actual prices vary based on requirements and the SLA you want, but for a pretty basic dedicated service with a loose SLA you're going to easily pay 10 or 20 times more than you would for similar bandwidth via a "buffet" style residential connection.
The DREN network... Was I the only one that thought of Farscape when I read the name?
Oh man, we are so screwed!
Lowest bidder, baby!
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
After acquiring Qwest (formerly USWest) they found themselves with a lot of cable but not quite the subscription levels they needed to maintain their cash flow. At the time Qwest was also recovering from when their CEO Joseph Nacchio was caught cooking the books / insider trading.
The Centurylink union workers' contracts have been being extended daily and weekly since they are up for renegotiating. This process has been going slow and there have been talks of strikes. Hopefully this 3/4 billion dollar contract will give the telecommunications union employees some room to breath and the contracts will be finalized without any cuts to their healthcare coverage (reportedly the main thing up on the chopping block.)
The Blade Itself
Paul, you fail it. Your skill is not enough.