BOSTON, MA - April 30, 2007 - OCCAID, a research and development consortium between ISP’s and private sector technology companies, today announced beginning of a series of nationwide upgrades of its network infrastructure.
Known as OCCAID2, the project calls for systematic upgrade of consortium's entire network footprint, with goal of providing up to 10Gbps of bandwidth to metro areas and 2.4Gbps for long-distance, respectively. The first phase deployment, which focuses on high capacity bandwidth to metro areas, began early February 2007 with activation of coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) optical delivery platforms in the New England area.
"The new optical network provided by OCCAID2 really turns the table around for its participants. Collaboration and exploration of cutting-edge IP technologies such as IPv6 and video at such screaming speed have never been possible before," said Michael Bran, assistant project director for the OCCAID2 project.
IPv6 Performance Expected to Triple
A significant part of OCCAID2 master plan is an agonizing task of replacing hundreds of low-speed tunneled VPN connections to native Ethernet connections throughout the network. Works are already under way to upgrade these aging tunneled connections in a number of cities. "We've already shut down five aging tunnel aggregation servers in New Jersey, St. Louis and other locations and started migrating connections to new facilities that are capable of delivering high-speed bandwidth. By end of the project, we expect there will be zero tunnels inside the entire OCCAID core infrastructure, completely replaced by optical wavelengths and Ethernet connections."
Additionally, with the help of new infrastructure partners, CRG West and ThinkTel Communications, new peering points are being added to the network in west coast and Canada. These new peering points will help alleviate congestion and reduce delay by introducing high performance native IPv6 connections in areas where OCCAID previously had little or no coverage. Project engineers are predicting that these improvements will provide a net gain of three times the current network performance.
Steve O'Brien, lead project engineer at OCCAID, Inc. said, "We're pleased that the first phase construction of OCCAID2 is well under way and already producing results. Part by part, OCCAID2 is transforming an R&D network that was once started by a group of students using VPN tunnels, to a complete facilities based network covering more than 15,000 miles. The network has become a success story and we are excited about our latest endeavor."
About IPv6
IPv6 is an upgrade to the data networking protocols that power the Internet. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed the basic specifications during the 1990s after a competitive design phase used to select the best overall solution. The primary motivation for the design and deployment of IPv6 is to expand the available 'address space' of the Internet, thereby enabling billions of new devices (PDAs, cellular phones, appliances, etc.), new users (countries like China, India, etc.), and new, 'always-on' broadband technologies (xDSL, cable, Ethernet-to-the-home, fibre-to-the-home, PLC, etc.).
While the existing protocol, IPv4, has a 32-bit address space that provides for a theoretical 232 (approximately 4 billion) unique, globally-addressable hosts, IPv6 has a 128-bit address space that can uniquely address 2128 (about 340 undecillion) hosts. In practice, the number of global IPv4 addresses that can be used is far less, due to inefficiencies in their allocation and use. IPv4 simply cannot support an Internet scaling to many billions of globally-connected hosts. Network Address Translation (NAT) has extended IPv4's life in conjunction with private IPv4 addresses. However, NAT complicates application deployment and, more importantly, cannot support new Internet growth areas including those 'always-on' and 'peer-to-peer' services that require connections be established to devices in home networks.
About OCCAID
OCCAID is collaboration between research communities and ISPs, working to deploy next generation network technologies for enrichment of commercial and advanced internet applications. Through OCCAID, ISPs, carriers and researchers work together through partnership to develop and experience leading-edge internet technologies. For more information, please visit http://www.occaid.org.
Media Contact:
Chris Johnson
(617) 459-4051
pr [at] occaid.org