Gig – BYU Kelly McDonald, BYU (ret.) RMCMOA Workshop, Tempe Az. January 13, 2015

Background – since 2011 Glenn Ricart gave a presentation on Gig-U at the June, 2011 Westnet CIO meeting Pat Burns spoke again about the concept, in the January 2012 Westnet CIO meeting Regular reports of Gig – U and its value to community outreach

This caused me to have some Self Reflection….. What value would Gig-E provide to me? Awesome HD, (perhaps even 4K) Much more compelling gaming for family and friends New source of home heating. (Cisco 6509) Cool new neighborhood status symbol New home signage: “1 Gb onboard “

More Serious Thinking… For the things I am interested in, does Gb make a difference? (probably not, but I’m not a researcher) I asked a neighbor, who does heavy Landsat data analysis. (So, Dr. Long, what would you do, if you had Gb network capability from your home to the BYU campus?) After picking him up off the ground, we began to discuss it more seriously.

This More Serious Analysis Spawned my Epiphany… The Project was largely in the RFI/RFP stage to secure partners who will assist in the eventual build-out Eventually, universities would enjoy high speed (fiber- based) connections through their service providers in the community, but much utility work needed to be done BYU and it’s municipality (Provo, Utah) already had this capability

Veracity and BYU Veracity provided BYU’s local dial-tone, as well as long-distance services. They also serviced most of the apartments that BYU students live in. Veracity operated the Provo City’s optical fiber network, but struggled to keep it afloat In November of 2011, we approached Veracity about becoming a peering and bandwidth partner.

Provo, Utah was Google Fiber’s Third City Provo, Utah and Google-Fiber have worked together to transition the residential fiber network to Google Fiber Google offers Internet and television services. They do not offer residential phone services 5 mb-down/ 1 mb-up – Free, 1 gb-down/1 gb-up - $70/month Television channels, $50/month I have used this service for the past year, and have been very pleased with the reliability and performance

What do I think is needed? Bandwidth is what was needed when aggregation was the goal Enabling the individual researcher is a different problem. Here, reducing RTT is the key. Much more peering should be considered. Perhaps we should establish peering zones at our institutions and invite all of the ISPs to connect. Perhaps we push the borders of our network deeper into our campus to further reduce RTT For 90% of our constituents, they already have more than enough bandwidth available to them.

Fort Collins Community Network Scott Baily, CSU

FCCN - General Description CSU provides low-cost bandwidth to public sector entities in the Fort Collins area Sharing infrastructure, aggregating BW Made possible by: Fiber from Platte River Power Authority Commitment from CSU’s Leadership Fostering the right relationships early on Nothing fancy, but effective

Initial Participants (circa 1999) CSU – Local bandwidth aggregator & “hub” Platte River Power Authority – local fiber provider and participant City of Fort Collins Larimer County Poudre School District (Fort Collins) Front Range Community College

Later Participants City of Loveland Poudre Valley Hospital System (now UC Health) Liberty Common Charter School Original participants are all still there

FCCN Members: Lease fiber circuits from PRPA Share equipment purchase and maintenance costs Participate in meetings Vote on significant decisions

CSU Provides Best effort support (really pretty good!) Connectivity to the FRGP Quarterly invoices, based on proportional usage Performance and monitoring tools Bandwidth at CSU’s actual cost Meeting coordination, agendas, minutes, etc.

CSU Does Not Provide Other services typical of an ISP, e.g.: DNS, Websites, mail spooling, etc.

Governance Very lightweight governance MOU between CSU and each participant Simple majority vote required on purchasing and other significant decisions Governance seems sufficient here, so no compelling reason to change it

Results Quite favorable – public sector entities receive affordable and dependable connectivity Reliability has been excellent, overall Membership has been very static over time Outreach/public service benefits to CSU, without requiring unreasonable resources

Futures Talking with City of Fort Collins about a community Gigabit initiative Perhaps to become the next generation FCCN Things are progressing slowly … Boulder seems to be less risk-adverse, and may set a good example for Ft. Collins

Lessons Learned Develop and maintain key relationships Document everything Take the initiative, if you believe this is the right thing to do in your community Codify agreements Lots of personnel changes since we started Provide self-help tools and basic training to participants

Boulder Research and Administration Network (BRAN), Front Range GigaPoP (FRGP), Bi-State Optical Network (BiSON) 1 Marla Meehl UCAR/FRGP/BiSON Manager UCAR/NCAR

24

25 Colorado Network History NSFnet national R&E network Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Operated mid-1980s to 1995 Encouraged creation of regional networks to aggregate Westnet (Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah) Still operates as an affinity group Meets bi-annually managed by Marla Operated and managed by Colorado State University and the University of Colorado 56Kbps, T1, to T3

26 Colorado Network History – Cont’d Very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) funded by the NSF to connect the supercomputer centers including NCAR OC-3 (155Mbps) to OC-12 (622Mbps) Left out universities and other entities Internet2 formed and created the Abilene Network – 1999 Formed by 34 member universities Still in operation with a 100Gbps backbone Own fiber for expansion

27 Colorado Network History – Cont’d National LambdaRail (NLR), Inc. Founded in 2003 and operational in members formed including the FRGP Owned 12,000 mile national Level3 fiber optic footprint In November 2011 the control of NLR was purchased from its university membership by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong for $100M His intention to upgrade NLR infrastructure and repurpose portions of it to support an ambitious healthcare project The upgrade never took place. NLR ceased operations in March 2014

28 Boulder Research and Administration Network (BRAN) – January The City of Boulder (the City), the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the Department of Commerce Laboratories (DOC) share an important fiber optic network that interconnects the participating organizations BRAN provides a significant, local, next-generation, fiber optic infrastructure that gives the partners a competitive advantage in research, higher education, and administrative functions. The network links greatly improve the ability of each of the partner organizations to conduct their business, as well as enhance their ability to serve the public. The fiber network is over 11 miles in length. The cable path extends generally along a north-south corridor within the City, and the route of the network links the partners' many facilities to capitalize on the network infrastructure already in place, to utilize rights-of-way, and to transect properties that the partners control.

What is the FRGP? For over 14 years, the FRGP has advanced the research and educational goals of government, nonprofit, and educational participants in the region by establishing and maintaining a unique multi-state network infrastructure that is owned and controlled by the FRGP participant research and education community. Starting new 5-year agreement cycle 7/1/14 29

What is the FRGP – Cont’d The FRGP is a consortium of Universities, non-profit corporations, government agencies, colleges, K-12s, non-profit corporations, and non-profit health care entities who cooperate as part of a Regional Optical Network (RON) in order to share wide area networking services including the commodity Internet, Internet2, intra-FRGP, caching, and peering connectivity. UCAR provides the management, engineering, and network operations center support for the FRGP. 30

FRGP Benefits FRGP participants typically enjoy reduced costs, shared expertise, shared services, increased buying power, and economies of scale. Aggregated and direct intra-participant network access This includes access to all participants, secondary connections behind primary FRGP participants Direct peering connections including Comcast, Google, CoreSite Any2, and the Energy Sciences network (ESnet). 31

FRGP Benefits Access to multiple commodity Internet service providers at 10Gbps offering resiliency and diversity TeliaSonera and Level3 Traffic aggregation and FRGP membership in The Quilt, Inc. provide cost savings for commodity Internet services The FRGP also participates in the commercial network peering program known as TransitRail (TR)/Commercial Peering Service (CPS) managed by Internet2 Designed to improve network performance through peering relationships with commercial networks to help participants reduce the overall cost of, and reliance on, commodity Internet transit services. Carries 30-50% of FRGP traffic 32

FRGP Benefits Provides caching services as part of the Akamai and Netflix (carrying ~7Gbps) Provides connectivity to the Internet2 network Either directly for Internet2 members or qualifying community anchor institution via the US UCAN program (formerly known as SEGP) 50Gbps to Chicago 10Gbps to Salt Lake City 10Gbps to Los Angeles (soon to be 100G) Seattle soon to be 100G 33

FRGP Traffic FRGP Traffic (excludes caching and intra-FRGP) ~14% commercial IP transit (Level3 and TSIC) ~60% peering (ESnet, Google, TR/CPS, Any2) ~26% Internet2 34

FRGP Benefits Has supported a doubling in traffic growth every 2-3 years since inception Currently serves approximately one million users whose organizations participate in our research and education community in Colorado and Wyoming Multiple locations to terminate circuits for redundancy 35

Western Regional Network (WRN) The Western Regional Network is a multi-state partnership to provide advanced, robust high-speed networking for research, education, and related uses. WRN is a collaboration of the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP) in Washington, the Front Range GigaPoP (FRGP) in Colorado, the University of New Mexico on behalf of the State of New Mexico, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), and the University of Hawaii. Share Internet2, intra-WRN, and commodity Internet 36

Bi-State Optical Network (BiSON) 4 The Bi-State Optical Network, or BiSON, is a collaboration of research and educational institutions in Colorado and Wyoming that utilize fiber optic links for high-speed optical networking BiSON participants receive robust, redundant access to regional and Wide Area Network (WAN) services.