CenturyLink Providing DoD's Equivalent of Internet2

Nerval's Lobster writes "Network provider CenturyLink has won a $750 million contract from the Department of Defense to network the latter's sites together as part of the military equivalent of Internet2. The contract calls for CenturyLink to connect as many as 150 DoD locations nationwide with a dedicated high-speed fiber-optic network, with speeds ranging from 50 Mbits/s to up to 100 Gbits/sec. Given that the contract also calls for the telco to deploy Ethernet, IP and optical services, it's likely that the 50-Mbits/s threshold is a per-user basis, with site-to-site communications in the gigabit range. It's all part of the U.S. Department of Defense's High Performance Computing Modernization Program (DoD HPCMP), which aims to solve complicated and time-consuming problems with massively-parallel computing and very high-speed networking. The HPCMP program was formed in 1992, with the aim of connecting what had been separate facilities and test labs developed and maintained by the Army, Navy, and Air Force. That network is known as the Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) network, which currently uses an OC-48 optical network providing 2.4 Gbit/s between facilities, according to the military."

Re:If the military's current network gets 2.4Gb/se

[Anonymous Coward]

2.4Gbit/sec used to be a big deal, now it is not

The backbones are all 100+Gbit/sec (often 10x10Gbit/sec or multiple 40Gbit/sec interfaces)

My business routinely moves 20-30Gbit/sec of data around the internet (video streaming) and during large events, we can do 100Gbit/sec for a few hours.

Re:I have CenturyLink

[funkboy]

And all I get is 1.5mbps DSL because they are still using ancient copper out in my neck of the woods. C'mon... PLEASE.

There's nothing wrong with copper or its age. You're too far from the CO.

If competitive carriers like CenturyLink had access to facilities that THE PUBLIC PAID FOR that now belong to Verizon et. al. they could put gear in the patch cabinets much closer to their subscribers (this is known as FTTC). In the UK there are several carriers using VDSL2 technology to provide 80mbps down/20mbps up service over "ancient copper" for a little more than the price of a normal DSL line, because their gear is only 300m from the subscriber in the neighborhood patch cabinet.

But the US Congress repealed the legislation requiring incumbents to allow acces to their facilities in 2005, so the end result is that the broadband situation in the US for most folks is:
  - Incumbent DSL that isn't faster than it was 10 years ago
  - Cable
  - If you're very lucky, fibre

Because users don't necessarily get that much

[Sycraft-fu]

So first off, there are different kinds of fiber. The FTTH stuff you tend to see is PON, passive optical network. You can look on Wikipedia for a pretty good article on the details but more or less it is a shared type of connection where everyone is on the same connection. A Point to multipoint kind of deal. Well, that costs less than doing direct point-to-point fiber as you see in backbones. The downside is, of course, you are all sharing the same bandwidth. If there's 100 people on one line you all share the bandwidth (via TDMA usually). Same basic idea as cable modems.

The other thing then is oversubscribing the backhaul. When a provider gives you cheap 1 gpbs fiber, they aren't providing backhaul all the way up the chain to make sure you 1 gbps no matter what. They oversubscribe at every level. So say there's 100 people on your segment. That's 100:1 oversubscription right there. That then connects back to a datacenter and, say, 30 other segments connect to a switch, which has a 10 gbps uplink to the core. Now you are 3000:1. The core then only has so much out to the higher level of the network as so on.

Now that works fine for users. If you've ever worked in a big office environment or university it is the same way. You might have gig to your desktop, then that switch with 24 people only has gig to the floor switch, which only has gig to the main switch, and then only a gig off to the Internet. However it still can be fast. Reason is that you don't all use your connections full bore all the time. You get some data, and then it sits idle. So long as people play nice and share, it can be fast despite the oversubscription and still be cheap.

However that's a real cost difference than backbone lines. Taking something like the DoD's network where it is a dedicated OC-48 connection from each site back to some central infrastructure, and probably then larger lines between the different infrastructure sites, well that is a bunch more money.

Now as someone pointed out the DoD's net is also outdated, but there are also real cost differences for different levels of service. Also shit gets more expensive in an exponential fashion as bandwidth goes up. Getting a switch fabric that handles a few gigabits of traffic is easy. You can get a lil' 24 port 10/100 switch for like $70. You want gig? Still pretty cheap, $180ish. Ok how about 10 gig? That's more like $8000 and it doesn't even have interfaces in it, you'll have to buy SPF+ units for each port. 100gig? I don't even know, those are the "call us for pricing" kinds of switches. Easily 6 figures or more for 24 ports.

Gig technology is pretty cheap these days, so you can provide it to end users pretty cheap... so long as you do plenty of sharing on the backhaul.