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- Path: sparky!uunet!olivea!decwrl!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!cincsac.arc.nasa.gov!medin
- From: medin@cincsac.arc.nasa.gov (Milo S. Medin)
- Newsgroups: comp.dcom.cell-relay
- Subject: DOE and NASA select Sprint for nationwide cell-relay service
- Message-ID: <1992Aug17.213137.21490@news.arc.nasa.gov>
- Date: 17 Aug 92 21:31:37 GMT
- Sender: usenet@news.arc.nasa.gov
- Organization: NASA Science Internet Project Office
- Lines: 93
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- SMDS interoperability is included in this BTW...
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- Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 14:47:00 GMT
- To: paoloop.nasamail@nasamail.nasa.gov,
- /C=USA/ADMD=TELEMAIL/PRMD=GSFC/O=GSFCMAIL/DD.UN=PUBINFO/@nasamail.nasa.gov,
- /S=<PAOLOOPATJPLPOST%JPLPIO@gemini.arc.nasa.gov>/O=CCMGW/DD.SITE=JPL/,
- <PAOLOOP@JPLPOST.JPL.NASA.GOV>, p@nasamail.nasa.gov,
- /C=USA/ADMD=TELEMAIL/PRMD=GSFC/O=GSFCMAIL/DD.UN=PUBINFO/@nasamail.nasa.gov
-
- From: <hqnewsroom@nasamail.nasa.gov>
- Subject: HQ92-132/NASA/DOE &SPRINT
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- Drucella Andersen
- Headquarters, Washington, D.C. August 17, 1992
- (Phone: 202/453-8613)
- Jeff Sherwood
- Department of Energy, Washington, D.C.
- (Phone: 202/586-5806)
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- RELEASE: 92- 132
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- NASA/DOE SELECT SPRINT FOR COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES
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- The National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA) and the Department of
- Energy(DOE) today announced that they have selected Sprint to provide broadband
- communications services that will upgrade the technology of three of their national
- research data networks.
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- The contract has an estimated value of more than $50 million over the next 5 years.
- Sprint will use a new technology based on high speed transmission of fixed length
- cells of data to enable the communications networks to increase speed tremendously,
- from 1.5 million to 622 million bits per second. This contract is expected to accelerate
- Sprint's schedule in making the new technology available on a nation-wide
- commercial basis, originally not expected before 1994.
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- Four companies will work together on this state-of-the-art technology. Sprint,
- Kansas City, Mo., will provide fiber-optic communications facilities. TRW, Redondo
- Beach, Calif., will provide new broadband access switches developed by their Space
- Communications Division. Cisco, Menlo Park, Calif., will supply network routers and
- Digital Equipment Corp., Maynard, Mass., will be responsible for the network
- management software.
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- DOE's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and NASA's AEROnet and Science
- Internet (NSI) provide high-speed, nation wide and international data communications
- to support a variety of open research and educational programs in energy,
- aeronautics, space and Earth sciences. Universities, laboratories and research
- centers use the networks. The NSI project offices are located at NASA's Ames
- Research Center, Palo Alto, Calif. The National Energy Research Supercomputer
- Center at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif., manages
- ESnet.
- -more-
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- This activity is funded under the Federal High Performance Computing and
- Communications program. The program was a 1992 Presidential initiative and was
- authorized in the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. A fundamental objective
- of the initiative is to promote U.S. competitiveness in the fields of scientific computing
- and communications.
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- The program is a nine-agency effort with four major components, including High
- Performance Computing Systems, Advance Software Technology and Algorithms,
- National Research and Education Network (NREN) and Basic Research and Human
- Resources. The selection of Sprint represents one of the first major contracts to be
- established under the network component of the program.
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- This contract makes Sprint the first carrier to provide wide-area ATM service. ATM
- stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode, an emerging technology, and will enable
- networks to evolve from the current T1-based bandwidth of 1.5 million bits per second
- capacity to substantially faster speeds, with steps to 45, 155 and 622 million bits per
- second in the next few years, for a total increase in speed of 400 times. By
- comparison, approximately 20 pages of a standard-sized dictionary can be transmitted
- in one second at T1 rates. At the highest rate planned, about 8,000 pages of
- information will be transmitted per second.
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- The ATM technology is considered the precursor to a broadband technology,
- called B-ISDN, that will support future multi-media universal transmission. This
- technology will be capable of simultaneously carrying voice, data and video
- communications traffic as well as bandwidth-intensive applications, for example, the
- transfer of high definition television images and links for networks with high capacity
- Local Area Networks.
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