The Southern Crossroads: A Model for High Speed Education & Research Internetworking

This paper describes the scope and objectives of the Southern Crossroads project. The Southern Crossroads, operating under the auspices of the Southern University Research Association (SURA), will provide access to advanced, highly integrated, digital communications services for education and research across the southeast region of the United States. This project will provide an architectural and economic model for a highly functional, sustainable communication system with the ability to integrate high performance voice, data, and video services in a competitive, multi-vendor environment. The Southern Crossroads will incorporate a hierarchy of services possibly including connectivity for individual educational institutions to state-based aggregation points (gigaPOPs), connection of gigaPOPs to form the Southern Crossroads backbone network, and an array of network management and value-added gateway services.