The Internet is growing at an amazing rate (see
Internet Software Consortium Internet Domain
Survey), and WPI's consumption of bandwidth to the Internet is growing as
well. WPI's external connections are made at the Goddard gigaPoP on Main Street
in Worcester.
Currently, WPI has a connection to Internet2, an academic research
network. The available Internet2 bandwidth is up to a gigabit per
second. For commodity Internet, we have a connection to Cogent at 500
megabits per second over a gigabit link, to Charter at 10 megabits per
second over a gigabit link, and to Level3 at 40 megabits per second,
carried over a small portion of the gigabit Internet2 link.
Updates Archive
July 20, 2012
This spring, the commodity service over the gigabit Ethernet link
to Charter was increased to 500 megabits. The gigabit link to Cogent
remains at 500 megabits, for a total service of 1 gigabit. Should
either link fail the WPI community should not notice the loss, since
these two high-speed connections give us redundancy. The link to
Boston University will be phased out, since it is not of a magnitude
to give us redundancy and it is too small to balance traffic with the
two 500 megabit feeds.
September 29, 2009
Boston University has switched their NoX Commodity Internet
Service offering from Sprint to Level3. Since we subscribe to that
service, we are now connected to Level3 insted of Sprint. The service
remains at 40M.
February 4, 2009
WPI has connected to Cogent Communications at 474 Main. We have a
Gigabit Ethernet connection to them over fiber and we are initially
allocating 500M of Internet Service.
January 30, 2008
WPI has requested disconnection of the OC3 to 1 Summer Street in
Boston, since we will be using the NEREN Gigabit Ethernet ring to
connect to the NoX henceforth.
December 5, 2008
WPI has connected to a Gigabit Ethernet ring from NEREN, the New
England Research and Engineering Network. NEREN operates a fiber
optic ring which circles through Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode
Island. We have connected to the ring at our campus edge at 474 Main
Street and at the NoX in Boston. We are using this Gigabit link
instead of the former OC3 (155 megabit) link as our connection to
Internet2, and its Commodity Peering Service. We are waiting for a
replacement for a dead-on-arrival optical interface, after which we
will have a redundant connection. Until then, we are only running on
half the ring, but still at the gigabit data rate.
May 2008
WPI began using the Commodity Peering Service of Internet2.
Internet2 has been peering with ISPs and key providers around the
country to bring access to the commodity Internet to Internet2. This
new service offers higher speed, lower latency connections to much of
the Internet via our Internet2 connection. Formerly, the Internet2
connection only connected other Internet2 members, state education
networks, and research facilities. This enables quicker access to
Youtube, Google, and lots of other services.
November 28, 2007
The Sprint bandwidth was increased to 40 megabits. This has
turned out to be a reliable and useful service.
October 1, 2006
A third Internet feed has been arranged via the NoX. The Tier 1
provider is Sprint. We are hoping that this enhances WPI's connection
to the Internet and we will see how this balances with our other
Internet links.
September 28, 2006
A discussion with Charter explains why our two Internet feeds are
not as well-balanced as we had hoped. Although Charter has Level3 and
AT&T as Tier 1 providers, they are only advertising WPI to the
Internet over the Level3 connection. ProSpeed also uses Level3. It
appears to us that most net traffic prefers to use ProSpeed, making
the Charter link less useful than we had hoped. We are evaluating our
options.
September 15, 2006
The ProSpeed Internet feed was raised to 40M
August 15, 2006
The ProSpeed Internet feed was raised to 30M from its low summer
setting.
May 15, 2006
The ProSpeed Internet feed was lowered to 20M for the summer.
May 1, 2006
The Charter Internet feed was turned up at 30M. We will use this
as a second feed to give us diversity and redundancey in our
connection configuration. Although we had expected this link to turn
up some months earlier, Charter had some difficulties increasing their
bandwidth. Growth in home Internet subscriptions and our unusually
large (for Charter) request for bandwidth caused them to delay.
January 31, 2006
Intellispace assets were purchased by ProSpeed. This new company
will give us the same Internet service.
October 2005
Intellispace announces impending bankruptcy. Evaluating our
options, we approached Charter Communications. Charter has AT&T
and Level3 as Tier 1 providers. WPI has been peering with Charter for
a few years in order to offer better connectivity to campus from
Charter Cable home subscribers in the area. This direct connection
avoids using the costly commodity Internet connections of both Charter
and WPI for this traffic. This same fiber link will be used for the
new commodity Internet service.
August 15, 2005
The bandwidth to Intellispace is raised to 50Mbps for the academic year.
May 15, 2005
The usual reduction of Internet bandwidth is arranged with
Intellispace for the summer months.
October 15, 2004
WPI re-homed our Internet2 connection from a direct link to
Abilene in New York to a link to the Northern Crossroads (NoX) gigaPoP in Boston.
August 20, 2004
Intellispace bandwidth raised to 50Mbps for the arrival of the students.
August 11, 2004
Peering arrangement with Charter Communications completed.
May 2004
Intellispace bandwidth set to 15Mbps for the summer.
September 16, 2003
E-xpedient link no longer operating.
September 2003
Intellispace bandwidth raised to 45Mbps for the arrival of the students.
May 2003
Intellispace bandwidth set to 15Mbps for the summer.
August 12, 2002
We have completed the connection to our new Internet provider,
Intellispace, at 45Mbps.
July 1, 2002
The transfer of Yipes' Boston area network, including
WPI's Internet link, was made to e-xpedient, completing their
purchase of this portion of Yipes' assets.
May 2002
Yipes bandwidth changed to 15Mbps for the summer.
March 22, 2002
Yipes filed chapter 11 bankruptcy.
September 2001
Yipes bandwidth was changed to 50Mbps for the regular terms.
May 2001
Yipes bandwidth was changed to 15Mbps for the
summer.
February 2001
Commodity Internet has been switched to Yipes.
December 2000
We plan to disconnect the Qwest DS3 in order to return the
Internet2 connection to a full OC3, and the WPI commodity Internet
will be handled by Yipes.
October 10, 2000
The OC3 feed from the Internet2 Abilene network was opened to the
Goddard gigaPoP.
September 22, 2000
A DS3 feed of commodity Internet was initiated from Qwest to the
Goddard gigaPoP. This feed was contained within an OC3 circuit.
The T1 lines are no longer used.
September 2000
WPI signed with Yipes, a provider with a different model of
offering Ethernet connection to the network instead of traditional
telco data connections (i.e. T1, T3, OC3, etc.) This should offer
us flexibility in changing data rates since the rate can be change
by reprogramming the interface, not needing to wait for
installation of telco equipment. Our initial rate of connection
is projected to be 25 megabits. Yipes uses Qwest, as we do
already, and also Level3 and UUNet, so we will have some
redundancy of connection.
July 2000
The C&W T1 line was decomissioned, leaving 5 T1 lines. The
expectation was to have a T3 by the beginning of term, but the
installation was late.
November 16, 1999
Two more Qwest T1 lines were added. With the C&W line, the total
was 6 T1 lines of commodity Internet.
April 20, 1999
Three T1 lines of Internet service from Qwest were installed and
the campus Internet routing was moved to a Nortel router, which
had more ports than the Cisco router we had been using. The C&W
line will be moved to this router and we plan to drop GTE service.
More connectivity from Qwest is planned to be added next year, as
demand warrants.
August 1997
WPI increased its available Internet network bandwidth by adding a
second T1 connection to MCI's POP in Charlton, MA. MCI merged
with WorldCom and they were required to divest itself of its
Internet so that the resulting corporation did not have
overwhelming domination of the US Internet market. Cable and
Wireless purchased the MCI's Internet network and have become our
ISP as a result. At this point, WPI had two T1 lines supplying
commodity Internet.
In order to enable the connection to two providers, the CCC purchased
and manages WPI's own network router. The CCC also had to upgrade
the routing protocol to Border Gateway Protocol version 4 (BGP4).
BGP4 protocol is required to load-balance between disparate
Internet providers. BGP4 needs more memory and router compute
power than the simpler, single provider, Routing Information
Protocol (RIP) which was formerly used. BGP4 also required
assignation of an Autonomous System Number (ASN) to WPI. ASNs are
only assigned to ISPs and other organizations with multiple,
disparate Internet links.
Managing the router has given the CCC more flexibility in dealing
with network problems and has provided the CCC with the means to
collect statistics on WPI's usage without depending on the ISPs
for usage statistics. Having two providers has allowed WPI to
stay connected to the Internet through three network outages in
the past six months. The CCC collected and ISP provided
statistics are available by following the links at the
top of this page.
First Connection
WPI's first Internet provider was NEARnet (the New England
Academic and Research network), which was operated by BBN. BBN
has been a pioneer in Internetworking, starting with their being
the prime contractor for ARPANet, back in the '60's. WPI began
with a 56K connection, and later upgraded to a T1 (1.55 million
bits per second) connection to this provider. We averaged under
5% utilization of the T1 in December of 1992