Net@EDU Broadband Policy Group

On November 1-2, 1999, the Broadband Pricing Forum was held in State College, Pennsylvania to address issues and develop organizational approaches to the problem of the cost of high bandwidth service. As a result of that meeting, the following Goal Statement for the Working Group was established and the tasks of the Working Group were initially divided into the three Task Groups defined below. The Broadband Policy (formerly Pricing) Working Group then evolved to show an increased interest in helping shape federal/national broadband public policy. To this end, the BPG restructured its mission to reflect this evolution in strategy.

Goals of the Broadband Pricing Working Group

The Broadband Pricing Working Group was formed to address the current high cost of long haul high bandwidth service (OC-3 and above), an issue of particular concern to the higher education institutions needing to connect to high bandwidth national networks such as Abilene. The Working Group intends to provide an environment for gathering and sharing information among manufacturers, carriers and Net@EDU members on issues related to bandwidth pricing. The goal of this effort is to develop mechanisms that will result in the availability of more affordable broadband services in the local, regional, and national networking arenas. If we are successful, the availability of affordable broadband services will benefit all sectors of the community: Manufacturers will sell more equipment, carriers will sell more circuits and services, and universities will be able to focus on supporting advanced research and applications development that consume bandwidth rather than working to find ways to limit bandwidth consumption.

Task Groups

Occassionally, task groups are created to concentrate on specific projects designed to help educate the higher education and broadband vendor communities. Below is a description of BPG task groups along with their current status.

1. Value add of the Higher Education community to the Telecommunications Industry
   Chaired by Christopher Peabody, Georgetown University

   Higher education represents a unique market to telecommunications and network service providers. Our students are the future consumers of their products. Access to them during the years that they are preparing for their future can create life-long customer alliances.

   Universities also offer providers access to our faculty and their research, which often involves leading-edge technologies that are of interest to the telecommunications industry. We offer testbeds for trials of new services, and gateways to markets, both on and off campus markets, for commodity services. Through these commodity service opportunities, universities offer carriers the opportunity to gain customers and retain these customers for years with minimal marketing costs.

   The purpose of this Task Group is to develop a short white paper that will provide qualitative and quantitative guidelines that define and support the value that higher education can offer telecommunications and network service providers. The intent is that universities will use this paper to help establish strategic alliances with carriers and that carriers will use this paper to gain internal support for developing unique relationships with the broader university community, including supporting such efforts as those of the pricing working group.

   Status: White paper completed. This is a live document and will be monitored by the Net@EDU staff. Higher education, broadband vendors, and other interested parties are invited to contibute. Contributions may be sent to Garret Sern at gsern@educause.edu.

2. High Speed, cost-effective Access to the National Education Research Network (Abilene)
   Chaired by Jim Williams, Indiana University

   The Abilene Network is recognized as the national research and education backbone. Abilene currently operates at backbone speeds of OC-48, with plans to increase to OC-192 as soon as robust technology support is available at that speed. The Abilene goals are clearly articulated at www.internet2.org/abilene. To achieve these goals, it is critical that GigaPops, Connectors, and individual institutions have the ability to establish a high-speed, cost-effective connection to Abilene.

   The purpose of this Task Group is to solicit, collect, and assemble the strategies and tactics that various institutions and organizations have used to establish high-speed, cost-effective connections to Abilene. The ultimate objective of this working group is to organize these individual documents into an overall set of "effective practices" that would be of value to the entire R/E community.

   This set of effective practices can vary from:

   • How a consortium of universities was formed to negotiate as a distinct contracting entity with carriers
   • Methods and strategies to secure "out of budget" funding for securing high-performance network connectivity
   • Experiences, technical, financial and operational, with "private optical fiber networks"
   • Novel partnerships with carriers to deliver cost effective high-performance connectivity
   • Other possibilities not represented yet
3. High Speed, cost-effective Access to National networks beyond Abilene
   Chaired by Tom West, CENIC
   

   Planning for the future must include a vision beyond today's high-speed backbone networks. In planning to build out or institute long term leasing arrangements for fiber optic paths or other solutions that lower our costs, we must be careful not to be focused on a single carrier that today offers best cost. Becoming a captive market removes market pressure for pricing advantage. For this reason, any solutions must be designed to afford best availability of services. The goal of this Task Group will be to investigate best practices to achieve/maintain this competitive environment and to organize a set of best practices for the members of the community to use in addressing future year needs.

   Status: Two papers on future strategies for accessing broadband networks submitted as of 9/17/01.