Addressing the research and education community’s relatively small size with its need for the latest cutting-edge technologies, the Level 3 partnership with the new Internet2 Network assures reliability and expanded breadth of services on a national scale, at incremental costs to achieve long-term affordability.

The Level 3 carrier agreement will provide the community unprecedented control over the networking infrastructure, without taking on the risks of equipment sparing and obsolescence as well as the burden of substantial operational responsibilities.  Since the carrier provides an SLA for the waves on the system, the IP network will have carrier-quality provisioning, which is expected to be minimally three 9’s (99.9%) uptime, but likely to be closer to five 9’s (99.999%).

Because Level 3 already has the organizational and procedural structure in place to ensure network reliability, it has no difficulty in offering production-level support (service level agreements) on its layer 1 wavelength services as part of this partnership.  These wavelength services will reach beyond the new network backbone to everywhere the carrier and its business relationships deliver networking services.

Additionally, Internet2 has guaranteed access to strategic assets such as long-haul and metropolitan fiber for years to come, ensuring continued industry engagement with the community.

Internet2 decided to form this relationship with a carrier, and not a particular vendor technology, to sustain a neutral relationship with its technology partners and to provide the community the flexibility to deploy best-of-breed equipment over the life of the network partnership.

Level 3 was chosen partly due to its decision to deploy Infinera’s next-generation Digital Transport Node optronics. The low cost and fully flexible add/drop capabilities of Infinera’s photonic integrated chip technology align perfectly with the service objectives for the new Internet2 Network.

An aggressive roadmap, which includes 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps as well as GMPLS optical user-to-network interface (UNI) development, ensures this network’s usefulness well into the foreseeable future.  Level 3 and Internet2 will therefore not be facing difficult end-of-life equipment.

Internet2’s new network creates an asset that serves the needs of the entire research and education community – from the regional optical networks to K-12 students. This new infrastructure will provide both experimental and production services within the same architecture through the most cost-effective means possible. Researchers will be able to perform experiments across their own on-demand wavelengths while universities will be able to obtain low cost commodity IP through their Internet connection.