Thought Google Gigabit fiber was cool? Check out the UW’s 100-Gigabit network

In the rare holiday-Friday news that isn’t bad, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced today that they were funding a 100 Gigabit network upgrade for a consortium that includes UW-Madison.

It will create the US Unified Community Anchor Network (US-UCAN), which will:

U.S. UCAN’s coast-to-coast advanced infrastructure will, in partnership with regional and state research and education networks, connect America’s community anchor institutions—schools, libraries, community colleges, health centers and public safety organizations—to enable advanced applications not possible with today’s typical Internet service. U.S. UCAN fills a critical gap, linking community anchor institutions together into an open, national network with next-generation capabilities, operated with end-to-end transparency and the high levels of performance uniquely suited to the needs of this community.

This is a big deal for UW Madison. Ron Kraemer, the CIO, explained:

This award will essentially bring the Internet2/NLR backbone through UW-Madison. We will no longer be a spur from Chicago, but a major link on one of the fastest networks in the world.

It is hard to describe the incredible value this will bring to research and education in our state.

This program is funded through the BTOP program of the stimulus,  which also funded MUFN, the Madison Unified Fiber Network. (In fact, US UCAN and MUFN are both “Middle Mile” BTOP projects.) I’m sure that we’ll be looking to link MUFN into US UCAN.

So, does this mean that your cable modem is going to get upgraded from 10 Megabits (0.01 Gigabit) anytime soon? Unfortunately, probably not. After researchers on the UW-Madison campus, tenants in the University Research Park are likely to be the among the first beneficiaries of  this network, because there’s already some infrastructure in place to provide easy connectivity between the research park and the UW. MUFN also does not directly connect to home users, though some people may connect through networks served by MUFN.

But, someday, connecting resources at the UW and other research institutions to people in their homes is the ultimate goal, and there’s still a lot of work to do in order to enhance that last mile.