To: Prospective GENI Participants
NLR is a consortium of regional Research and Education (R&E) networking organizations that owns, controls and manages a national network infrastructure. In particular NLR owns its own national footprint dark fiber plant and its own DWDM optical systems that would allow it to provision dedicated AUP-free waves at a cost to network researchers significantly below the market price.
Specifically, NLR’s founding principles are consistent with the overall goals for the GENI project. NLR is committed to supporting network research, not just the use of high bandwidth and internet based connectivity for applications and users. In fact, NLR’s bylaws state that 50% of its DWDM system capacity and 50% of its switched Ethernet capacity (VLANs) should be used for networking research purposes. Furthermore, as a network of networks, NLR’s infrastructure has the flexibility to support a broad range of experiments, services and users, thus is able to support the radical network experimentation and development required by the GENI program.
NLR’s highly cost-efficient and AUP-free infrastructure makes it suitable for a full and open range of GENI participants including user traffic that will allow effective experimentation with different architectures, services and applications, as proposed for GENI.
NLR also offers highly flexible support resources especially via its Experiments Support Services (ESS) which is able to customize NLR infrastructure for individual user or project needs in terms of access, equipment collocation, instrumentation, measurement and provisioning of backbone services.
Therefore, given its founding principle of commitment to networking research and given that it owns its infrastructure, NLR is prepared to offer winning proposals to the GPO solicitation access to its facilities, services and capabilities as well as support resources at the cost that is available to its members, especially during the GENI pre-construction prototyping and development phase. We encourage researchers submitting proposals to contact the NLR ESS directly for information regarding NLR’s infrastructure and services as well as for letters of support for their proposals.
NLR looks forward to work with the GPO and NSF toward making this major initiative highly successful.
Tom West, President and CEO
National LambdaRail
