National Broadband? There's One Already -- With No Taxpayer Funding!

Amongst the fuss and pointless politicking about the National Broadband plan, did you know that there already is a nationwide super-fast fiber broadband infrastructure? It's called National LambdaRail (NLR), and it's been privately funded. It's a coast-to-coast fiber network with 12,000 miles of cable (enough to stretch half way around the entire Earth) which has been quietly under construction since 2003. It's so tightly managed and efficient that in November 2009 it had not one single second of downtime--a shocking stat to both sysadmins and any home broadband user fed up of repeated slow-downs or service dropouts. NLR is currently used as a test-bed of sorts for high-tech computer-based experiments about high speed networking, and as such lots of its traffic is from academic institutions. But NLR is noting it's the only such grid in the world to host university research traffic alongside government data streams, commercial uses, and even data flowing between medical centers. Cisco systems is a big partner in the project and says that although NLR does carry government data, it's purely on a client-customer basis. NLR, Cisco adds, has in fact "built this peerless digital infrastructure with no government aid or direct tax payer funding."