Early in May Vice President Albert Gore toured AT&T Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill, NJ and saw a demonstration of the XUNET/BLANCA project with NJ Governor Jim Florio and U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg.
Afterwards AT&T announced that a major step forward had been taken in making the vision of a national information superhighway a reality. Now operating the nationŐs fastest wide-area Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network over fully optical links, the experimental research network will help in the development of commercial ATM networks. AT&T's 500-mile fiber optic network runs at 622 Mbps (megabits per second). The new network is an enhancement to AT&T's existing Experimental University Network (XUNET), an ATM network that connects seven leading research laboratories and universities and three AT&T switching sites nationwide.
The new 622 Mbps links will remain connected to the rest of the XUNET, which uses ATM at 45 Mbps, through AT&T's XUNET experimental switch in Chicago. XUNET, sponsored by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) with funding for research provided by NSF and ARPA, forms an integral part of the BLANCA Gigabit Testbed. The network currently links the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California at Berkeley, Rutgers University, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and three AT&T network switching sites.
With the speed of this network, the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica---approximately 13 million words could be transmitted in less than 1 second. (The same amount of information sent from a home PC via the usual modem speed would take more than 2 1/2 days.)
Networks such as XUNET could revolutionize people's lives. For example, high-resolution images of complex medical data, such as x-rays and scans, could be transmitted nearly instantaneously from a remote hospital to a specialist located across the country or the world to save diagnostic time. Designers would be able to use their desktop workstations to harness the power of remote supercomputers to build 3D prototypes of products. Interactive multimedia audio, full-motion video, and imaging conferences could bring people from distances together as if they were physically in the same room.
The fully optical network from Madison, WI to Champaign-Urbana, IL is connected through the AT&T XUNET testbed ATM switch in Chicago and uses optical amplifiers which carry much higher speed signals than previously. The network has undergone operational testing and is currently active. Work will continue in the areas of HPCC applications testing, including real-time networking, multimedia, and desktop videoconferencing.