Broadening vBNS Access: The New Connections Program

Mark Luker

Table of Contents

• Stan Barber's Notes
• October 1996 NANOG Home Page

Stan Barber's Notes

Many of NSF's main mission customers look fondly back on the NSFnet days. Some folks got better service back then then they do now.

vBNS succeeded the NSFnet as part of the transition to current commercial Internet. The Internet is a great success, however, there are problems. Congestion, serving high performance applications, and proving a variety of levels of quality of service.

A new connections program was announced in March 1996. This will provide money for a connection to the commodity Internet. These connections must scale.

A GigaPop is a shared mechanism to connect to the comodity provider along with those that connect to the vBNS. They can also be used to connect between campuses.

vBNS is changing in seven ways.

• Connect more institutions
• More types of applications
• New Agency Internconnections
• New Technology
• High Level of Stability
• Higher Speed
• new AUP

Thirteen University connections have been awarded and another batch is coming out soon.

Closely-Related Efforts

• Internet II -- Coordinated Effort of 40+ universities and industry partners to achieve advanced network capabilities. Focus on enhanced applications for R&E. NTTF at Educom is organizing this effort.
• Next-generation Internet -- Announced on October 10th, linking up k12 schools, link 100+ research instituitions, enhanced related R&D, Large scale networking group (of Federal Entities), impact NSF high performance connctions.

NFS will push the Internet Performance envelope.

Promote cost effective designs that will benefit all of reserach & education.

For more information, see http://www.cise.nsf.gov/ncri/connect96.html.

More about Internet II

• Priorities
  • re-create leading edge R&E networks
  • enable the next generation Internet
• Application
  • interactive,network-based instruction
  • real-time, sensor-based modeling/simulation
  • large scale, multisite computation
  • very large database processing
• Technical Objectives
  • implement scaled up Internet protocols
  • voice & video
  • interoperability with wireless media
  • quality of service choices
  • measurement/optimization

Currently, there are about 50 universities involved.

Questions & Answers

How will this be extended to Europe (and other continents)?

There will be a new international connections program coming out soon. This will compliment the new domestic connections program.

What about getting other industry involved in this?

Those in well organizaed groups (like the oil industry or the automotive industry). They are certainly welcome to participate.

There are two classes of users: the researcher who needs to crash the network and those researchers that need a stable substrate for their research.

The vBNS will service the last group. The former will be served in other ways, like working through DARPA and NSF to do this.