NLR Offers to Use its Resources to Accelerate the Creation of a Unified Community Anchor Network (UCAN)
In support of joint FCC filing with 20+ networking groups and community organizations advocating UCAN
Cypress, CA, February 1, 2010 -- NLR and Internet2, together with 25 state and regional research and education (R&E) network organizations, filed comments to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on January 27, 2010 to help inform the development of its National Broadband Plan. The filing recommends that the plan build on the extensive investment the R&E community has already made in national network infrastructure, leveraging the human expertise and collaborations they have developed to bring advanced broadband connectivity to the nation's "community anchor institutions."
NLR enthusiastically endorses the joint filing. Signers included NLR, Internet2, the Quilt, Statenets and over 20 state and regional networks. The filing calls for the development and deployment of a Unified Community Anchor Network (UCAN), which would heavily draw upon research and education's existing infrastructure and expertise to serve schools, community colleges, libraries, healthcare providers, public safety agencies and other community anchors. Recognizing that providing broadband to community anchors has been a market failure, the R&E community has come together to call on the FCC to instead use the existing, national assets of R&E supplemented where needed with extensions of those assets.
NLR also supported a separate joint filing supporting Anchor Institution Networks which also called for the creation of UCAN.
"We're delighted at the broad-based collaboration among the R&E community on this issue," said Glenn Ricart, NLR President and CEO. "NLR, together with its state and regional network members, is prepared to work with the rest of the R&E community to bring our strengths and assets to the table to help accelerate the creation of UCAN."
Already interconnected, or capable of being interconnected, to over 30 state and regional networks and owned and managed by the U.S. research and education community, NLR is a coast-to-coast, non-profit network dedicated to public service.
In addition, NLR advocated for the joint filings with a supportive filing of its own, pledging to use its assets to help in the creation of UCAN. Unique among national networks which could play a role in UCAN, NLR is not limited by a restrictive acceptable use policy which might otherwise exclude some public service activities.
NLR stands ready to work with others in the national, regional, and state networking communities to extend its existing nationwide infrastructure to help connect public service networks and networks of community anchor institutions on a nondiscriminatory, neutral basis and, with appropriate funding under a National Broadband Plan, to extend and maintain that leading edge infrastructure to thousands of community anchors across the nation with state-of-the-art speed and efficiency and at a fraction of the cost of constructing a new network.
For complete comments of NLR and its partners filed with the FCC, visit: http://www.nlr.net/nationalbroadband.php.
About National LambdaRail (NLR)
Owned by the U.S. research and education community and dedicated to serving the needs of researchers and research groups, NLR is the innovation platform for a wide range of academic disciplines and public-private partnerships. NLR's coast-to-coast, high-performance network infrastructure offers unrestricted usage and bandwidth, a choice of cutting-edge network services and applications, and customized support for individual researchers and projects. For more information, please visit www.nlr.net.
Media Contact:
Kristina Scott, NLR, 1-650-678-9034, kscott@nlr.net