Roadblock: NM outgrowing Internet 2 connection

Dr. Dale Alverson of the University of New Mexico's Center for Telehealth, envisions a time when medical students from all over the world can collaborate in a virtual reality emergency room, complete with computerized patient, tools and cyber representations of themselves.

The project, developed by the supercomputing centers at UNM and the University of Hawaii, is in its fourth year and has generated $3.5 million in research funding. But he says the future of the project could be stymied by one major problem: New Mexico is the only state not fully connected to a new high-speed network with massive data transmission capacity that allows professors and researchers to share data, video and other information at speeds far exceeding the capabilities of the aging Internet.

New Mexico is the only state in the nation without a gigabit point-of-presence, or gigaPOP, access point to Internet 2 -- the new generation of the 30-year-old network we now call the Internet. Built by a coalition that includes the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and more than 200 research universities, and limited solely to research purposes, Internet 2 operates at a blinding 10 gigabits per second -- about 15,000 times the speed of a traditional broadband connection and 45,000 times that of a dial-up modem.

Supported by a transcontinental fiber-optic network called Abilene, research institutions in states or regions connect to a regional gigaPOP, which in turn connects them to Abilene via one of about a dozen "core nodes" in the system.

But UNM's connection to the nearest Internet 2 core node in Denver, upon which all of New Mexico's research institutions depend, runs at about 100 megabits per second -- about one one-hundredth the transmission speeds attainable on Internet 2.

Though on-campus networks run at speeds comparable to Internet 2, the network by which the state connects to the Denver node is where things slow down.

"If we try to send it over Internet 2, it hits the [data transmission speed] bottleneck. It's like trying to connect to an eight-lane highway with a two-lane road, and it's getting to be more of a problem as our ability to collect data and analyze it increases," says UNM Vice Provost for Research Terry Yates.

Alverson agrees.

"It's profound that here we are, a state with two national labs, competitive universities, and we're the only state without a gigaPOP," he says, comparing the project to the new intersection of Interstates 40 and 25, completed about a year ago. "It's like our Big I. We need an Internet 2 exchange."

With that in mind, a consortium of information technology leaders from several of the state's universities, as well as two large telecommunications firms that do business in New Mexico, are working with the University of New Mexico's Computer and Information Resources and Technology (CIRT) officials to build an appropriate onramp to the new information expressway.