Access to Advanced Networks

A worldwide tussle over Internet access policy is playing out right now, and many countries are closely watching what the United States does. This talk will provide a brief overview of the U.S. regulatory structure for high-speed Internet access.

Most Americans rely on DSL and cable modem for their broadband connection, but are these the only options? Other technologies once derided as impractical are beginning to show promise. Can alternative broadband technologies help facilitate the oft-repeated vision of federal policymakers to provide "affordable, ubiquitous broadband for all Americans, regardless of where they live"? Industry experts and entrepreneurs seeking to shake up the current broadband marketplace will discuss the practical progress of these alternatives to date and whether adjustments in federal IT policy regulations are needed to enable their chances for success.

The authors discuss dark fiber, fiber-optic cables that have already been deployed, but not yet "lit".

Presentation at the November 2004 ECAR Symposium. In the past 20 years, we have seen the establishment of the global Internet and the Web. We are now seeing the emergence of universal grid infrastructure, providing researchers from many disciplines interactive visual access to remote scientific instruments and enormous distributed data archives. Smarr believes this will induce another transition in campus infrastructure, perhaps on a larger scale than previously, due to the creation of optical networking "clear channels" or "lambdas" across the campus, state, nation, and globe whose entire bandwidth can be dedicated to a single campus researcher. In the United States, the backbone is the recently live National LambdaRail, which is linked to the international Global Lambda Integrated Facility. Smarr discusses examples of applications that require "personal lambdas" and reviews some of the research on how to couple these enormous data pipes across campuses to link into the clusters of individual laboratories.