Connecticut’s 10 Gigabit Network
What can our state do with unprecedented capacity to transfer data?
Connecticut has one of the world’s fastest fiber optic networks. With speeds of 10 gigabits per second, the Connecticut Education Network boasts upload and download times 1,000 times faster than the average home broadband network. Provided a user’s computer has the processing power, this can provide access to high-resolution media and…. not sure.
The $40 million installation brought capacity to the state, but the plans for utilizing it are still unclear. Access is available only to public education institutions in the state, many of which don’t have the infrastructure to connect to it. To date, no major curriculum initiatives are underway either.
What could we do with our network? A lot. A contest held in 2000 by the National Laboratory for Applied Networks (now defunct) recognized the work of several engineering teams who pushed the 1 Gigabit/sec limit. Their work centered on access to large data sets, especially ones that included high resolution images. Other entrants suggested that very fast networks permitted grid computing, harnessing the power of multiple machines simultaneously to perform extremely complex calculations. Whether these demanding applications would be useful in Connecticut’s public school’s remains to be seen.
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