Where do we go from here?
As a key part of our plan, the location at Portland
State University gives the PREN consortium several unique opportunities
for local and interstate (Washington/Oregon) network growth. First of all,
we should be able to connect easily to other Oregon state universities by
interconnecting to the current OWEN/NERO Oregon university network at PSU.
PSU is already an active partner in that network with a DS3 connection to
OWEN/NERO
Oregon State University in Corvallis
already has announced its intention to be dually homed to both the
Pacific/Northwest (Seattle) and Oregon (Eugene) Gigapops. We anticipate
that the PREN network could facilitate the former connectivity and we hope
that it could motivate the upgrade of the Portland-Corvallis NERO circuit
to the OC-3c bandwidth level. This is fundamentally why we have chosen a
Cisco 7513 router as our hub in order to provide expansion space for
future developments.
Long-term, the Portland area
partners (PSU, OGI, and OHSU) will investigate Portland area dark fiber
sources with the idea that we could replace the local SONET-based
connections with higher-speed and potentially more economic connections.
We are engaged in discussions with two governmental agencies with
significant fiber resources in the Portland area — the Oregon Department
of Transportation (ODOT) and Tri-Met, which operates the metropolitan
light rail service.