Data express gigabit junction with the next-generation Internet

Important as a very high-performance backbone is to the next generation of the Internet, it is no less important that the points at which people connect to the backbone-the so-called points of presence, or POPs-provide an equivalent level of performance. For almost three years, members of the academic, research, and business community in the North Carolina region known as the Research Triangle-the area lying amid the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill-have been working to create a high-performance regional network. As partners in the North Carolina Network Initiative (NCNI), they have built a network that can serve as a POP handling the multigigabit traffic to be delivered by the next-generation Internet. Thence comes its name: a GigaPOP. Like a great railway junction, the GigaPOP is a central distribution point where huge amounts of digital freight are moved between various end points and the main line (such as the very high-performance Backbone Network Services, or VBNS). The NCNI is one of a handful of regional networking organizations around the country. The others include the California Research and Education Network 2 (Calren2), the Metropolitan REN (MREN) serving the Chicago area, the Houston Area Computational Science Consortium (HACSC), and the New York State Educational and Research Network (Nysernet). NCNI´s work, which predates most initiatives for the Internet´s second generation, serves as a model of how various regions can latch onto the coming information superhighway to good effect