Technical Design (continued)
The T-3 circuit will be leased from US West and can be upgraded to OC-3 in the
future (as noted above, public ATM is not available in Laramie). By multiplexing
voice and data over a single circuit, the overall cost of back-haul access circuit
is minimized.
If this proposal is funded, UW plans to upgrade the data connection to ATM
running at near T-3 capacity (a portion of the T-3 leased circuit will be utilized
for voice circuits). Figure 3 describes the upgraded network. The primary router
at UW that connects the campus to the Internet will be connected to an ATM switch
in Laramie. The ATM switch in Cheyenne (located in a State of Wyoming facility)
will be connected to the ATM network of a national ISP. At the present time,
Sprint is the most likely ISP since one of their major national POPs is located in
Cheyenne. Two PVCs will be established: one PVC from the UW router to the ISP’s
router for transporting data destined for sites connected to the same ISP (for
example Sprint) and one PVC from the UW router to a router at a proposed gigapop
site at NCAR in Boulder. Thus all non-local data will be delivered to the NCAR
gigapop except for off-site data destined for customers of the selected ISP. The
gigapop at NCAR will separate the remaining data between the vBNS, commodity
Internet providers (such as MCI), and other networks as appropriate.
Figure 3 – Enhanced ATM Network
The advantages of connecting to the NCAR gigapop include:
- direct access to the vBNS
- direct access to NCAR/UCAR
- direct access to other Westnet schools
- potential for shared Commodity Internet
- direct access to non-vBNS sites
- access to other government networks (MAGIC, ESNET, NREN)
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