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The Northern Crossroads,
An Internet2 gigaPOP and New England Regional Aggregation Point
Map
of the Northern Crossroads
Executive summary
The Northern Crossroads
(www.nox.org), is an affiliation of Academic,
Corporate, and Commercial Carrier (ISP) partners with a common interest in facilitating
advanced networking in New England. The Northern Crossroads meets several times
each year to consider issues at hand and to hear from and talk with advanced
network advocates, manufacturers, and service providers about their efforts,
products, and services, as well as their commitment to advanced networking initiatives
generally and Internet2 (I2) specifically. Participants include institutions
of higher learning and other organizations that support research, education,
and economic development. The Northern Crossroads is one of the seventeen large
regional advanced networks in the United States. (see: www.thequilt.net).
A project of the Northern Crossroads the NoX-AP(aggregation point) was established
in October 1999 under a collocation arrangement with Qwest Communications at
their point-of-presence (PoP) in Boston at 230 Congress Street. Harvard University
serves as the NoX-AP(Internet2 gigaPOP) network operations center. GigaPOP participants
connect to the AP in various ways, including dark fiber and local and regional
commodity ATM services. Membership in the Northern Crossroads is not limited
to those connecting to the gigaPOP. Additional members in the Boston area and
throughout New England participate in the monthly meetings.
Harvard University as an institution is committed to providing the support for
the Network Operations of the Northern Crossroads gigaPOP and promoting the
use of advanced data and voice applications across its infrastructure.
Harvard Universities Involvement
Since 1999, Harvard University
has worked closely with the Northern Crossroads members to provide operational
support for the New England Internet2 gigaPOP as well as significant network
design and planning. This effort included working with each member to develop
the best plan to connect their institution to the regional network as well as
jointly executing the plan with the institution and providing continued advocacy
for Internet2 among current and potential members. The gigaPOP also provides
private peering (exchanging routes) with Commercial Internet Service Providers
and Commercial Internet access. The gigaPOP achieved operational status with
nine primary members and is quickly approaching 20 primary members, including
K-12, corporate, and government participants. The basic support functions we
provide are the day-to-day management and operation of the gigaPOP. Yet, our
role and those of all members go much further.
A list of the key NOC goals,
objectives, and services follows:
- establish a high-performance
regional exchange point for participants & commodity network service providers;
- share human, material,
and intellectual resources to foster the development and delivery of advanced
network services and applications to our respective communities.
- networking monitoring
and troubleshooting with four hour response time on failures
- primary DNS services
for both IPv4 and IPv6
- providing network element
data including up to the minute and historical reports on bandwidth usage
- consultation and coordination
with vendors on a members behalf
- network element configuration
and installation
- support for advanced
networking protocols including multicast routing (MBGP, MSDP, PIM-Sparse)
and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)
- planning for future
network services and infrastructure
- effective and timely
communication with the members
- provide superior customer
service to the membership
Additionally, the NOC works
with participants to establish mutually agreed upon performance objectives and
operational procedures to enable each Participant a practicable quality of service
over the gigaPOP.
Vendor Related Services
The NOC does negotiate with
vendors on the participants’ behalf for services, including equipment
maintenance, fiber connectivity, and circuit pricing. The NOC provides rack
and circuit location information to vendors for interconnectivity and works
with regional and national providers to seek advantages to interconnection between
the Northern Crossroads and a vendor’s network. The Senior Technical Analyst
responsible for the NOC operations of the gigaPOP meets on a continuing basis
with Internet Service Providers, dark fiber providers, and is active in local
government pole & conduit commissions in the Boston Metro Area.
Community Outreach
The endeavor impacts all of the participating University communities.
Students and Faculty have high speed connections both regionally and nationally
to other participating institutions. Outreach efforts to K-12 students provide
access to video conferencing and enrichment programs. As an example, a K-12
Science teacher and his/her class is able to remotely control telescopes at
sites around the world via a program at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for AstroPhysics.
Applications once used across campus are now being used across the country and
internationally. Harvard currently has VoIP extensions (Harvard 5 digit centrex)
deployed in Japan, California, and Europe. When connecting a primary university
member, in essence we are also connecting that member’s affiliates and
“Communities of Interest” are formed across the gigaPOP. With the
Northern Crossroads, five primary communities have formed with high speed connectivity
joining them. All of the major hospitals1 in New England are affiliated with
one or more of the University members. In Maine and Rhode Island K-122 is connected
with the University infrastructure and by extension to each other in different
states via the Northern Crossroads and nationally via the Internet2 network
Abilene. Along with the first two, which were expected, the marine sciences3
discipline has formed a large community in New England via the Northern Crossroads.
This not only includes the marine sciences departments at the Universities,
but includes (pending connections to) regional aquariums, data collecting sites
on the coast, and the WoodsHole area research institutions. The physics departments
of the New England institutions are collaborating in the Hadron Collider project
(a tier two data collecting site will be located in New England) and much of
the bandwidth required within the region for this collaboration is already in
place via the Northern Crossroads. Libraries are the fifth group including one
corporate participant EBSCO which provides services to University libraries
some of which are also connected at the Northern Crossroads.
Future Planning
This is an ongoing endeavor
and the next generation of the gigaPOP is already in the planning stages. This
may include metro and possible New England region fiber rings. This has the
opportunity to further define how the region and the members look at cost sharing
and application collaboration. The regional gigaPOP is viewed as an infrastructure
foundation and is the cornerstone of High Performance Networking in New England.
A distributed gigaPOP that may span states is in the planning stages. We are
also expanding to additional carrier hotels in the Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts
area to accommodate new connections and provide additional connectivity options
to the members.
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