Note: This is one of three articles in the February special edition of IT’s Bits newsletter.
Montana universities lead effort to connect Northern Tier to national network
UM’s network bandwidth capacity to the outside world will jump dramatically this summer, from 300 megabits to 10 gigabits.
In planetary terms, that’s like a leap from Mercury to Jupiter.
“We’re talking about an orders of magnitude increase in Internet bandwidth at a modest cost increase,” says UM CITO Ray Ford. “Everybody at every UM network port going to the outside world will see advantages.”
The Northern Tier Network, depicted by the dashed line on the map, will tie UM and MSU into the national research network, and provide new research, educational and economic development opportunities.
The advantages come as UM and MSU tie into a national research network in collaboration with universities along the “Northern Tier” between Seattle and Chicago. Ford, a co-founder and former president of the Northern Tier Network Consortium, has worked with colleagues from Montana and 11 other states to build agreements and garner funding.
“We’ve made a capital investment to light and maintain our own fiber, giving us bandwidth at the level of a ‘bandwidth wholesaler’ rather than having to buy bandwidth in large quantities but at ‘retail prices,’” Ford says. “Buying at wholesale prices rather than retail prices allows us to increase quality and quantity, yet lower costs.”
“We’re taking some risks,” Ford admits. “For example, will we need all of this bandwidth? We think we will. In fact, we think we’ll need not just a little more bandwidth, but orders of magnitude more bandwidth to support applications we don’t currently use-either because we can’t or because the applications haven’t yet been invented. That’s what has happened in the last 20 years, and we think that will continue to happen over at least the next 10 years.
“Ford sees the increased network capacity being used for high-quality video conferencing that begins to approximate true “remote presence.” It will also aid researchers connecting to remote super computers, and provide new learning opportunities for students, like the ability to operate equipment in a remote lab through the Internet.
For more on the Northern Tier Network Consortium, go to: www.ntnc.org.
