President Bush has passed into law a revised bill devoting $3,000m over five years to building a new National Research and Education Network after legislators eliminated Buy America provisions that the President had warned he would veto. The bill was originally put together by Senator Albert Gore three years ago and secures an extra $1,000m this year from the Federal budget to build a 1Gbps-plus network for users in government, education and industry. Work on the the network has been under way for some time: the National Science Foundation has been funding five test beds to examine different technologies. Originally, the network was thought of as of purely academic interest, but it in now being viewed as a public utility to which commercial concerns can have access. As a result, the legislation makes explicit that the network is to be designed in collaboration with its potential customers, should foster the development of privately operated high-speed networks, and must include a built-in accounting mechanism so that people can be charged both for network usage and for the information they access over it. But the US is not expecting benefit from the finished network – its real importance lies in the networking know-how that Congress hopes will accrue to US industry through its participation in the programme. AT&T Bell Laboratories is running one of the test-beds, called Blanca, which builds upon the Experimental University network that has been in place since 1986 and now links Bell Labs, Murray Hill, with the National Center for Supercomputer Applications and the University of Illinois, both in Urbana Champaign; the University of California at Berkeley; and the University of Wisconsin, in Madison. However, work at Bell Labs is beginning to make a mere 1Gbps look rather slow. At the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers Globecom trade show held in Phoenix, Arizona, Bell Labs researchers presented six papers on Luckynet, a 2.5Gbps network already in operation linking three sites – with one of the links running over a microwave connection and the others over optical fibre. The network, named after Bell Labs executive director Robert Lucky, will complement the network project and is an Asynchronous Transfer Mode network with a focus on integrated broadband communications to serve data, video, voice data and image applications. Richard Gitlin, head of the lab’s network systems research department, says that he believes that Luckynet will extend to other AT&T locations and will interwork with the network test sites.
