INDUSTRY

COLLEGE PARK, MD -- The Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) consortium and the Naval Research Laboratory announce the launch of the next-generation Advanced Technology Demonstration Network (ATDnet), an unclassified Department of Defense (DoD) research network. Partnering with Qwest Communications, Verizon, and Fibergate, this next generation ATDnet is a regional fiber test bed that will support research in emerging and experimental telecommunications technologies and applications. ATDnet is a partnership of multiple federal institutions that include the Naval Research Laboratory, the Defense Intelligence Agencys, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences, the Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency, and the Defense Information Systems Agency. The new infrastructure will enable investigations in very high-speed optical transport, ultra dense wavelength division multiplexing, non-homogeneous fiber performance, optical burst switching, and interactive high-resolution visualization. Understanding these experimental technologies across wide area networks is key to deploying the advanced services necessary to meet the DoD mission over the next 10 years. These efforts involve researchers at the ATDnet principal sites, regional MAX institutions, and their commercial partners. Qwest will be the primary backbone provider for ATDnet, in partnership with Verizon and Fibergate, a fiber-optic communications company. A key aspect of this effort is to provide ATDnet members direct access to a broadband fiber infrastructure--which will allow the MAX-ATDnet partnership to provision the network with new and experimental optical technologies as needed, without the risk of disrupting essential and production services, on the available commercial networks. It is envisioned that some of the applications to be tested will utilize single-stream bandwidths as high as 40-80-160 Gbps--capacities not feasible across current commercial networks. MAX, which will be responsible for the day-to-day operational aspects of the core ATDnet infrastructure, was founded in 1999 by the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and Virginia Tech. MAX operates one of the distributed 'gigaPoPs' in support of the national Internet2 initiative, providing connectivity to the Qwest-supplied Internet2 Abilene backbone through a 2.5 gigabit-per-second (OC-48) network in the Washington, D.C. metro area. The MAX network consists of a 50-mile ring of fiber optic cable with extensions into the Baltimore area and Northern Virginia. MAX is a consortium of regional university and government research labs with primary facilities located at the University of Maryland, College Park. "MAX was created by the partner universities to meet the advanced network needs of our universities for both research and education--capabilities and services not available through the commercial internet," said Don Riley, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of the University of Maryland. "The goal was to provide the advanced network infrastructure required to support both the experimental deployment of evolving advanced network technologies, and the development and deployment of new applications. This new partnership with the ATDnet consortium represents a significantly broader collaboration toward understanding how to design and manage the new generation of optical networking technologies." Jerry Sobieski, Director Network Engineering for MAX, said, "The close collaboration between the ATDnet community, the MAX community, and the commercial partners creates a technology pipeline where ATDnet takes laboratory technologies into the wide area infrastructure, MAX then deploys them as they mature into the 'early adopter' network to address applications deployment and scaling issues, and the carriers then commercialize the services in the private sector. We now have the capability to explore and integrate interesting new technologies at any layer of the network protocol stack, and to do so in a coordinated fashion among the regional research and education community. It's really cool."