1. National LambdaRail (NLR): Progress Report Tom West President/CEO, CENIC

3. NLR Implementation Schedule (as of 2/03/04) Chicago to Pittsburgh12/03 Sunnyvale to Seattle4/04 Pittsburgh to Washington DC3/04 Washington DC to Atlanta6/04 Atlanta to Jacksonville8/04 Seattle to Denver7/04 Denver to Chicago8/04

4. Current Members and Associates CENIC Pacific Northwest Gigapop Pittsburgh SC Duke Univ./NCLR MATP/Va. Tech Cisco Systems Internet2 Florida LambdaRail Georgia Tech CIC LEARN (Texas) Pending: UCAR/FR/IM/LLC Cornell/NYSERNET

5. Many different perspectives “NLR… … aims to reenergize innovative R&D into next generation networking technologies, protocols, services, and apps.” … is a virtual laboratory.” … will contribute to the (NSF) Cyberinfrastructure that is critical to progress in every field of science & engineering.” … will help fuel the growth of the TeraGrid and computational science in general.” … motivates our planned regional optical network.” … is a hedge timed to hit the trough of the Internet/telecom economy.” … is both an experimental facility and a complex, multi- dimensional experiment in and of itself.”

6. Distinguishing features - I Largest higher-ed owned/managed optical networking & research facility in the world ~10,000 route-miles of dark fiber Four 10-Gbps ’s provisioned at outset First & foremost, an experimental platform for research Optical, switching & network layers Research committee (with 2 board seats) Advance reservation of capacity for research Experimental support center

7. Distinguishing features - II Use of high speed Ethernet for WAN transport 1O Gigabit Ethernet LAN PHY is primary interface Traditional OC-192 SONET available, too ‘Sparse backbone’ topology Each participant/node typically commits $5M Concurrent responsibility for developing optical networking capabilities and sustaining performance in nodal region

8. Distinguishing features - III Unprecedented level of self-capitalization for national networking initiative by higher ed participants ~$80M budget for full national backbone (CapEx + 5-yrs OpEx) Each contribution assumed to be ‘sunk cost’ Additional ’s (up to 40 on a given segment) can be provisioned with pricing tied to incremental cost