Despite a setback caused by Hurricane Katrina, National LambdaRail, a nationwide fiber-optic network designed to facilitate advanced network technology research, is gaining support.

While NLR is firmly planted in the research community, the results of experimentation and research done over the network are likely to find a way into the commercial arena, participants say, particularly in areas of next-generation protocols, network management tools, provisioning capabilities and security techniques - possibly in as little as 18 to 24 months, participants say.

Having finished the network's first build-out phase that connected points from east to west across the country last August, NLR's second phase connects southern points on the map and had been slated for completion in November.

However, Hurricane Katrina thwarted some of this progress, as a number of points of presence along the Gulf Coast are currently submerged, says NLR spokesman Greg Wood. The group plans to provide an update of phase two's progress this week, Wood says.

The first of it's kind, NLR's infrastructure uses dense wavelength division multiplexing technology to offer up to 40 simultaneous light wavelengths (or lambdas), each capable of transmitting at speeds of 10G bit/sec. Other research-oriented networks don't offer such dedicated capacity; Internet2, for example, connects more than 200 U.S. universities with one 10G-bit/sec link each. Currently there are six research projects underway that take advantage of NLR.

Cisco is providing the multiplexers, switches and routers for NLR, and Level 3 Communications is supplying the fiber. Sun in July announced it is working with NLR to connect its Sun Grid - an Internet-based utility service - to the network.

User involvement

But that's about the extent of vendor involvement in NLR. The network was designed by and for the research community, says Tom West, NLR's executive director, so the infrastructure is not managed by a vendor, but by users. "The primary benefit is this dedicated capability that is [the user's] own to control and manage," West says. NLR set a mandate that more than 50% of its capacity be dedicated to network technology research.

Users pay for a fixed amount of usage over a period of time, say three or five years, and get full use of one of the 40 dedicated wavelengths. That means researchers can experiment with new technologies without affecting or being affected by others. "It's like a highway system; I have my own lane, and no one else can get in," West says.