The National Lambda Rail

A Sept. 1 Telephony article noted the impressive pace at which open fiber networks are emerging.

"Across the country, those in need of broadband have launched grassroots public/private partnerships for creating fast, open fiber networks that link municipalities, hospitals, schools and other key community members, leasing excess capacity to encourage private providers to deploy broadband where it wasn’t cost-effective before. But whereas those efforts have previously been trials by fire, they are now imagined on a much more massive scale."

The National Lambda Rail led the way with its 12,000-mile, nationwide advanced optical network that supports many of the world's most demanding scientific and network research projects for more than 280 leading research institutions and federal agencies. All network partners have full access to the NLR network and have total control over how they use it, whether in advanced situations or to support public-private commercialization to help promote job growth and economic revival in their respective geographies.

The National Lambda Rail paved the road for many privately owned networks.
o The first high-performance national infrastructure owned by the research and education community

o The first transcontinental production 10 Gbps Ethernet network

o First intelligently managed nationwide peering and transit program focused on research applications to improve network performance and reduce costs of Internet services.

o The first national TelePresence network for the research and education community

o First international, multi-point TelePresence session over a research and education network

o First University-Corporate TelePresence connection over a research and education network

With unlimited capacity and speeds up to 40 Gbps, NLR provides users the choice of Ethernet-, IP- or Lambda-based connectivity and transport devices.

Some of the major research and innovations made possible by NLR include:

Atlantic Wave: NLR provides the backbone for Atlantic Wave, an international peering fabric enabling collaboration between researchers in Canada, the U.S., Caribbean and South America.

ESnet: NLR support high-bandwidth projects for thousands of researchers and collaborators for the Energy Science Network (ESnet) of the Department of Energy (DOE).

Open Cloud Consortium: The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) uses NLR as its wide-area testbed network, supporting the development of standards for cloud computing and frameworks for interoperating between clouds.

In upcoming blogs, we will feature several private networks, both national and local, that are making tremendous strides and testing the limits of community area networks.