From the issue dated March 14, 2003
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Lighting Up 'Dark Fiber'Collapse of telecommunications companies gives colleges rare, cheap opportunity to own networksBy FLORENCE OLSEN Colleges have long complained about being charged what they deem exorbitant
These colleges are acquiring otherwise unused fiber-optic capacity, called dark fiber, to build regional education networks, and some are even mulling the creation of a national fiber-optic network for experimental research. The situation represents "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" for many colleges to acquire their own fiber-optic capacity, says Steven C. Corbato, director of backbone network infrastructure for Internet2, the university consortium for advanced Internet applications. He is responsible for the design and engineering of Abilene, the Internet2 backbone network. By owning their own dark fiber, colleges think they can save significantly on Internet bandwidth costs. A mile of dark fiber that used to sell for $1,200 has sold, in some cases, for $200 or less since the downturn, a significant savings since intercity networks may comprise several hundred to several thousand miles of fiber. "When these assets go on the market, it's literally pennies on the dollar," says Sterling Perrin, a research analyst with IDC, a technology-consulting company. And the amount of dark fiber that is available today is "staggering," says Mr. Corbato. In the boom years leading up to 2002, telecommunications companies laid hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic lines crisscrossing the country -- and then many had to declare bankruptcy. Level 3 Communications, which is not one of the bankrupt companies, says it has 16,000 miles of intercity optical-fiber capacity available for sale. Proponents say the dark-fiber "pipes" contain so much capacity that every state community-college system could have its own education network, separate but connected to other state education networks and the Internet. The fiber's capacity is such that high-energy physicists could have a private data pipeline from their research labs directly into the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator at CERN, which is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. Universities in at least 10 states are acquiring dark fiber for research and education networks. "We need to get the other 40 states going," Mr. Corbato says. The projects that are under way "are very much in the early stages," he says, and in many cases, the universities and regional networks have not yet signed contracts with the carriers or fiber wholesalers that own the dark fiber. Universities' deciding to own rather than lease their data-communications circuits from commercial carriers, says Mr. Corbato, is as significant as some deciding years ago to generate their own power and stop buying it from public utility companies. Proponents argue that dark fiber will pay for itself, and that colleges can operate their own dark-fiber networks for less than they now pay to lease circuits from commercial carriers. While a few colleges that have examined the issue suspect that there may be hidden costs and that it may be better for companies to manage the networks, others are moving ahead. Take, for example, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For a large leased circuit -- one able to ferry up to 622 million bits of data every second between its campus and StarLight, an international Internet exchange point for optical networks, in downtown Chicago -- the university pays between $30,000 and $50,000 a month. The university is also part of I-Wire, an experimental dark-fiber network connecting the university to other universities and research laboratories in the Chicago area. The initial equipment cost to connect the university to the experimental network was less than $50,000, and the total annual cost paid by the national supercomputing center at the university -- for the network's power, equipment space, and fiber maintenance -- is $65,000 a year. Beside costing less, the university's I-Wire circuit has four times the capacity of the university's leased commercial circuit. On the one hand, the potential savings are dramatic. "Once you've made the initial investment, the break even on some of these big circuits is a month or two," says Charles E. Catlett, project director for I-Wire and senior fellow in the Computation Institute at the Argonne National Laboratory, near Chicago. But on the other, I-Wire is new and experimental, he says, so the university is not ready to pull the plug on the more expensive circuit. In California, dark-fiber networking is booming as a consequence of contracts signed by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (Cenic), a nonprofit group founded by the state's major public and private colleges. Cenic officials described one of those contracts as a "multimillion-dollar" deal to buy metropolitan and intercity dark fiber from Level 3 Communications. The state's two public-university systems, California State University and the University of California, along with its three major private research universities -- California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and University of Southern California -- will have Cenic-owned dark fiber connections to all of their campuses by fall of this year. Each of the new connections from the campuses to the California Education and Research Network (CalRen) will accommodate up to a billion bits of data per second, which is nearly 1,000 times more data than a broadband modem can handle today. The CalRen functions as the network for all research and education in California. Going National Officials have begun discussing an even more ambitious dark-fiber project, involving Cenic and eight other university consortia outside of California. Those talks are aimed at creating a national optical infrastructure that could connect to major Internet hubs in key cities. However, plans for that project, dubbed National Light Rail, are still "very fluid," says Thomas W. West, Cenic president and chief executive officer. The University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, which provides administrative support for the Internet2 consortium, has been involved in the National Light Rail effort, and it has formed a temporary holding company to acquire and assign dark-fiber capacity to universities. Most of the institutions that are working on dark-fiber projects are also members of Internet2. These early efforts of university consortia to cobble together a university-owned National Light Rail with dark fiber have created uneasiness, in part because they involve "a substantial amount of money in very tight-money times, in an area that has traditionally been funded by the National Science Foundation," says Huntington Williams III, president of Merit Network, Michigan's research and education network. But a major attraction of dark fiber is its potential for permitting colleges to increase their bandwidth consumption without increasing their monthly costs. "Universities are trying to find an affordable and reliable way to get much higher bandwidth than they can currently afford on the phone-company model," says Timothy L. Lance, president and chairman of NYSERNet, the New York State research and education network. Those benefits are likely to be most noticeable for institutions located in areas far from telecommunications facilities that offer Internet access, such as Michigan's Upper Peninsula. By the end of 2003, network officials expect to use dark fiber to offer academic researchers there much higher bandwidth at a much lower cost than their institutions pay today. Merit Network, in Michigan, has signed an agreement in principle with Charter Communications to buy dark-fiber capacity. Merit's use of the fiber will enable two public universities in Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula to reduce their telecom expenditures by a total of nearly $250,000 each over the next five years. Those universities -- Michigan Technological University and Northern Michigan University -- each spend nearly $400,000 a year on Internet connectivity. The Michigan agreement will also give the two universities "virtually unlimited bandwidth for the foreseeable future," says Mr. Williams. Better Technology In addition to the financial benefits, some college officials say that, for some kinds of research, dark fiber is an attractive alternative to commercial network services that do not use the advanced networking technologies that scholars need for transferring large quantities of data. The standard Internet protocol used in commercial networks, called TCP/IP, "is quite wonderful and has survived many orders-of-magnitude speed increases, but it doesn't work well [at speeds] above 100 megabits per second," says David G. Macneil, director of network relations at Canarie, a Canadian network-research group whose role is similar to that of Internet2. Many new science applications, for example, demand that researchers transfer 800 megabits of data per second or more. Even Internet2's Abilene high-speed network does not meet the needs of all computational and network researchers. Abilene, which runs on leased commercial circuits, cannot act as a private network between two research labs or two classrooms on different continents. A college's own dark-fiber network could. Scientists at several supercomputer centers say they are interested in dark-fiber networks so that they can test new protocols using those networks' nearly unlimited bandwidth. Such testing, if carried out on Abilene, they say, would disrupt the research and educational activities of others. Challenges for Dark Fiber Still, dark-fiber networks face hurdles. One is the cost of setting up the network, which includes the cost of purchasing the fiber and the optical and electronics equipment that lights the fiber to carry data. Ideally, experts say, colleges would own dark fiber extending from the campus to another university or to a carrier facility where a college's network would exchange data with other research and education networks, including Internet2, and with commercial networks that provide Internet service. All that adds up: In California, the average initial cost for a university to build its own optical infrastructure is about $400,000, even with fiber capacity selling at reduced prices. But with most colleges facing dismal budgets, many observers say that chief information officers are in a difficult position to ask for more spending on networks. Some states are offering creative financing to help universities acquire the needed capital. Michigan, for example, has created an organization known as the Broadband Development Authority. It will issue bonds and use the proceeds for low-interest loans to Merit Network to purchase dark-fiber capacity. Dark-fiber networks may have other, hidden costs. Steve Smith, chief technology officer for the University of Alaska System, worries that building a dark-fiber network there could put one or more local telecom companies out of business -- and eventually lead to higher prices through loss of competition. Mr. Smith says it would also be costly for the Alaska system to staff a center for monitoring and troubleshooting the network 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which would be required if it operated its own optical-fiber network. However, many states in which there is a statewide research and education network already have such 24-hour network operations centers, usually located on the campus of a major research university. Most network centers are set up to monitor the network connections to small institutions and to give those colleges troubleshooting tools and technical advice. The Alaska system will not try to acquire its own dark fiber, Mr. Smith says, but it will try to seek lower bandwidth costs and research-oriented network services through a bandwidth-buying consortium. Indeed, some carriers are offering to sell access to individual wavelengths of light on their fiber, an approach that could enable colleges to afford optical-fiber services without the initial expense and hassle of creating and then managing their own dark-fiber networks. These wavelength services are purchased for a flat rate through short-term contracts, typically for one, three, or five years, with the carriers who own the fiber. Some colleges find this approach appealing. A group of 30 universities and academic consortia, calling itself USA Waves, has formed a national buyers cooperative to purchase wavelength services at a reduced cost. But many colleges that have considered the question seem to want to own dark fiber. The key question remains how they will pay for it. The National Science Foundation has not indicated whether it will finance a dark-fiber infrastructure for research at the level that it financed NSFnet, an earlier research and education network. "NSF's role to date has been to understand, to monitor, and to lend encouragement to the people who are working on these projects," says Lawrence H. Land-weber, a senior adviser in the NSF's computer- and information-science and engineering office. Through its support of the TeraGrid, the agency already is supporting "early-stage prototypes" for a national optical-fiber network, he says. The TeraGrid is a supercomputer facility connecting five sites in three states at "gigabit" speeds. Last month, the agency also announced two new grant programs -- Experimental Infrastructure Networks and Networking Research Testbeds. Their purpose, says Mr. Landweber, is to study whether some science and engineering applications, especially those requiring large transfers of data, might actually work better on a new type of network -- one constructed with fiber and optical equipment that researchers themselves could configure and control. Understanding those networks "is the intellectual challenge that motivates this effort," says Mr. Corbato, at Internet2. But the dark-fiber efforts go beyond that, he says, to the fundamentals of broadband-network access. "We're really rethinking the economics." http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 49, Issue 27, Page A29
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education