Monday, June 4, 2007

Championship Ring

By Keith Regan

It's not made of gold and wasn't forged in the fiery furnaces of middle earth, but a ring touted as having almost unlimited powers has been created by the Five Colleges consortium.

The five colleges -- Amherst, Smith, Mt. Holyoke and Hampshire colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst -- recently marked the completion of the construction phase of a $3.6 million ring of fiber-optic cable that will offer direct, high-speed Internet access to the the Pioneer Valley campuses.

Conceived more than five years ago, the 53-mile loop of fiber took three years to design and permit and two more to build.

Already, some of the colleges are using the fiber network as their primary Internet connection, and more will switch over this fall, with future uses being mulled ranging from data exchange to Voice over IP phone services and IP video, said Donna Baron, the director of technology for Five Colleges Inc.

"What will happen in the future is anyone's guess," Baron said. "There have been discussions about IPTV, voice, video, disaster recovery, homeland security -- nothing is set in stone."

"There are probably applications for it that no one has even thought of yet," she added.

UMass Amherst will be the last campus to make use of the ring, since it had already installed a fiber connection of its own before the ring was finished, Baron noted.

The ring got its start some five years ago when the colleges were looking for a way to better connect their campuses, which have been networked together for more than 40 years, with students at one college in the network able to take classes at other campuses. A transportation network also links the campuses, which are bunched in the rural Hampshire County, north of Springfield.

Though the schools knew they wanted a fiber network capable of handling massive amounts of data, how to go about it was another question. The consortium explored options for leasing before deciding that building to own was the most cost-effective approach, thanks, in part due to the timing of the project's launch -- at the nadir of the telecommunications industry's post dot-com slump.

"The return on investment sold itself," Baron said. The group expects to earn back the cost within seven years by eliminating vendors who were reselling access and insulating itself against future price hikes.

The loop runs from the UMass campus, past the four other campuses and then to One Federal St. in downtown Springfield, where a vendor-neutral site enables the consortium to have a choice of access providers.

Adesta LLC, an Omaha, Neb.-based infrastructure and security services firm, built the network and connected it to the vendor-neutral services building in downtown Springfield. The all-fiber-optic ring offers twice the capacity of earlier approaches as well as more flexibility to buy access directly from service providers without going through resellers that add cost.

The network offers what Adesta president Bob Sommerfield called "almost limitless bandwidth" and the colleges hope to use it for various purposes, including connecting to Internet2, the research-focused network connecting primarily higher education institutions. Adesta has installed some 2 million miles of fiber-optic lines around the world, Sommerfield said.

Between campuses, the network will offer direct gigabyte speeds -- 1,000 megabits per second -- enabling fast transfer of large files by students as well as faculty engaged in collaborative research. The expected speed in accessing Internet2 will be 45 mbps, the equivalent of a T3 line and nearly 10 times as fast as most cable-based broadband Internet hookups.

In the future, the communities that host the ring may also find benefits. Dark fiber connections were put in place to municipal facilities in each community. Baron said future business partnerships are possible, but not yet formulated. "That's something we're just starting to consider," she said. "We know the potential is there."

Ellen Bemben, president of the Springfield-based Regional Technology Corp. (RTC), a regional tech-business trade group, said a relative lack of high-speed Internet access -- through fiber optics or widely available wi-fi -- is a competitive disadvantage for Western Massachusetts, one the RTC and the Patrick administration are working to fix.

"We have had success in reaching out to tech and life sciences companies and high-end manufacturers, but the lack of high-speed access is one thing that can keep us from running with the big dogs," she said, adding that Gov. Deval Patrick has made improving infrastructure in the area top economic development priority. "That the five colleges took the initiative on this on their own is great -- it shows that we can't afford to wait anymore."

Baron, meanwhile, said one takeaway from the long journey has been that Massachusetts could make the process of permitting such a project much less difficult. Getting permission to run the cable required going through multiple public utilities, local and state agencies, a Byzantine process that could easily scare away a private entity interesting in building a similar network, she said.

"It doesn't have to be that complex," she said. "It's not that complex in other states. We were fortunate because our whole existence didn't depend on this ring being built, but it became clear to me why there's not more infrastructure being built. If I were a commercial entity, I could not sit around for three years for this process to unfold."

Keith Regan is a freelance writer in Grafton.