SEACOM

SEACOM:

• Investors: Herakles (backed by Blackstone); Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (founded by Prince Karim Aga Khan IV of Pakistan) through IPS; Venfin (led by South African Johann Rupert); Convergence Partners (led by former South African DoC DG Andile Ngcaba); Shanduka (led by South African Cyril Ramaphosa); Neotel (has pledged ZAR 20 million for cable station)
• CAPEX/Cost : approx. USD 650 mn
• RFS : June 2009
• Financing arranged by Nedbank and Investec
• Suppliers/Contractors : Tyco
• Length 15,000 km
• Links Southern and East Africa, Europe and South Asia
• Capacity : 2 FP, 1.28 Tbps design
  

Source SEACOM/Terabit

• "The connectivity from Egypt to Marseille, France, will be provided through Telecom Egypt's TE-North fibre pairs that SEACOM has purchased on the system. TE-North is a new cable currently being laid across the Mediterranean Sea"
• "SEACOM, which is privately funded and over three quarter African owned, will assist communication carriers in south and east Africa through the sale of wholesale international capacity to global networks via India and Europe"
• "SEACOM will be the first cable to provide broadband to countries in east Africa which, at the moment, rely entirely on expensive satellite connections"
  

• "When it is fully functional in 2009, SEACOM will be a service provider of international fibre optic bandwidth along the east coast of Africa linking South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia to India and Europe"

• SEACOM is 76.25% African owned by: Industrial Promotion Services (26.25%), an arm of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development; Venfin Limited (25%); Convergence Partners (12.5%) ; Shanduka Group (12.5%)
• The remaining 23.75% is held by Herakles Telecom LLC

National Lambda Rail (NLR)

This is a work-in-progress & will be updated soon! :-D

Source Reese/NLR

Quotes taken from nlr.net

The foundation of the NLR infrastructure is a dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM)-based national optical footprint using Cisco Systems' 15454 optical electronic systems, with a maximum capacity of 40 and 32 wavelengths per fiber pair respectively. Each wavelength can support transmission at 10 billion bits per second (10 Gbps). This optical system is deployed nationwide across roughly 15,000 route-miles of dark fiber that NLR has obtained through Level 3 Communications. Four NLR wavelengths have been implemented using 10 Gigabit Ethernet LAN PhY (physical layer), a technology and architecture that had previously been limited to metro-area networks. NLR can also support the SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) Technology employed in traditional telecommunications networks, if needed. The initial wavelengths provide:

• a national 10 Gbps IP network to support internetworking and end-to-end transport protocol experiments,
• the first-ever national switched Ethernet experimental network with circuit-like 1 Gbps services,
• a quick-start facility for new research projects in support of data- and computation intensive science projects, and a redundant sparing capability in the event of a channel-specific failure.

Additional wavelengths are activated across individual segments of the infrastructure as needed. A more detailed description of NLR services and a guide for researchers interested in using NLR services are available. Nearly a dozen research projects are already using NLR services.

Quotes taken from Wikipedia

National LambdaRail is a high-speed national computer network infrastructure in the United States that runs over fiber-optic lines, and is the first transcontinental Ethernet network. The name is shared by the organization of research institutions that developed the network, and, to date, plans to continue developing it. LambdaRail is similar to the Abilene Network, but LambdaRail permits deeper experimentation than Abilene does.

It is primarily oriented to aid terascale computing efforts and to be used as a network testbed for experimentation with next-generation large-scale networks. National LambdaRail is a university-based and -owned initiative, in contrast with Abilene and Internet2, which are university-corporate sponsorships. This gives universities more control to use the network for these research projects. National LambdaRail also supports a production layer on its infrastructure.

Links in the network use dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM), which allows up to 64 individual optical wavelengths to be used (depending on hardware configuration at each end) separated by 100 GHz spacing. At present, individual wavelengths are used to carry traditional OC-X (OC3, OC12, OC48 or OC192) TDM circuits or Ethernet signal for Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

Internet2 + Internet2 Network (formerly Abilene)

This is a work-in-progress & will be updated soon! :-D

Internet2 Network (formerly Abilene) - Source internet2.edu

Quotes taken from internet2.edu

Internet2 is the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium. Led by the research and education community since 1996, Internet2 promotes the missions of its members by providing both leading-edge network capabilities and unique partnership opportunities that together facilitate the development, deployment and use of revolutionary Internet technologies.

By bringing research and academia together with technology leaders from industry, government and the international community, Internet2 promotes collaboration and innovation that has a fundamental impact on the future of the Internet.

• Internet2 is a not-for-profit advanced networking consortium comprising more than 200 U.S. universities in cooperation with 70 leading corporations, 45 government agencies, laboratories and other institutions of higher learning as well as over 50 international partner organizations.
• Internet2 members leverage its high-performance network (i.e. I2 Network) and worldwide partnerships to support and enhance their educational and research missions.
• Beyond just providing network capacity, Internet2 actively engages our community in the development of important new technology including middleware, security, network research and performance measurement capabilities which are critical to the progress of the Internet.

Quotes taken from Wikipedia

Internet2 is a non-profit consortium that develops and deploys advanced high-performance network applications and technologies for education, research, and the next-generation public Internet. It is led by over 200 universities and partners with many affiliate members and corporate members drawn from companies in the publishing, networking and other technology industries.

The original Internet2 project was founded informally in 1996 under the auspices of EDUCAUSE and was organized as the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) in 1997. UCAID later changed its name to Internet2. Internet2 is a registered trademark. The Internet2 consortium administrative headquarters are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Internet2 provides the U.S. research and education community with a network that satisfies their bandwidth-intensive requirements. The network itself is a dynamic, robust and cost-effective hybrid optical and packet network. It furnishes a 100Gb/s network backbone to more than 210 U.S. educational institutions, 70 corporations and 45 non-profit and government agencies.

The uses of the network span from collaborative applications, distributed research experiments, grid-based data analysis and social networking. Some of these applications are in varying levels of commercialization, such as IPv6, open-source middleware for secure network access, layer 2 VPNs and dynamic circuit networks.

Internet2, with help from its members, created the Abilene Network and was a prime investor in the National LambdaRail (NLR) project, with nearly 10 million dollars. During 2004–2006, Internet2 and NLR held extensive discussions regarding a possible merger. Key to this merger was the condition that Internet2 would operate its successor to Abilene using NLR's infrastructure (NLR has IRUs on actual fiber infrastructure from WilTel, now Level(3), where Internet2 utilizes leased optical wavelengths from Qwest for Abilene). Those talks paused in the Spring of 2006, resumed in March 2007 and eventually fell apart in September 2007.