Great gobs of gigabits! The Internet2 research and education group says it is upgrading its national backbone network with help from broadband stimulus funding, and the end result will be a structure delivering 8.8 terabits per second bandwith.

This super-fast system will connect the US Unified Community Anchor Network (US UCAN), around 200,000 community "anchor institutions"—K-12 schools, libraries, clinics, hospitals, community colleges, and such. In the winter of 2010, the project received a $62 million broadband stimulus grant from the government to get this project underway.

The plan is to roll out a series of advanced telemedicine and distance learning programs across the country "that are not currently possible with consumer-grade Internet service." Internet2 is a non-profit representing about 200 universities working with various corporations.

"Commercial networks are far too congested to support, and are not optimized for, advanced broadband applications for community anchors like telepresence and telemedicine," the project's stimulus grant application noted. They also "do not provide the necessary transparency required to immediately trouble-shoot application-crippling problems across networks. They also do not generally offer next generation Internet technologies like IPv6 and IP multicast, which are critical to certain applications."

Internet2 is deploying this with the assistance of the Ciena networking company. The project will deploy Ciena's ActivFlex 6500 Packet-Optical Platform for the network, which is also used in Vietnam, where the number of Internet users has more than doubled since 2005.

Ciena just concluded a 100G backbone trial with Vietnam Telecoms National that spanned 500 kilometers, connecting the cities of Vinh and Danang.